Australia has never lacked digital health investment. What it has lacked, at times, is a single, federal-level statement of what that investment is for. The Digital Health Blueprint 2023-2033, published by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, sets out to close that gap. As part of an EY team supporting the Department, I worked on the development of the Blueprint and its accompanying Action Plan.
The Blueprint states its vision plainly: trusted, timely and accessible use of digital and data should underpin a personalised and connected health and wellbeing experience for every Australian. That sentence is doing more work than it first appears to. It commits the Commonwealth to a ten-year view, not a budget-cycle view, and it names data trust and access as the foundation everything else sits on.
Trusted, timely and accessible use of digital and data underpins a personalised and connected health and wellbeing experience for all Australians.
Why a federal vision matters
The Australian Government is one of the largest and most consistent funders of digital health infrastructure in the country, from My Health Record to national clinical terminologies to electronic prescribing. Without a shared statement of intent, that funding tends to land as a series of good individual programs rather than a coherent system. The Blueprint gives every one of those programs a common reference point: does this investment help Australians access and manage their health information, and does it strengthen the policy, legislation and standards that everything else depends on.
That matters more than it sounds. A blueprint is only as useful as the discipline it creates. When a new proposal has to be tested against a published ten-year vision, it becomes much harder for good intentions to drift into duplicated infrastructure or investments that solve a problem the health system doesn't actually have.
A companion to the national strategy, not a competitor to it
The Australian Digital Health Agency's National Digital Health Strategy sets the sector-wide direction for digital health across government, clinicians, industry and consumers. The Blueprint operates at a different altitude: it is the Commonwealth's own statement of how it will use its funding and policy levers to help deliver that shared direction. Where the national strategy asks "where should digital health be heading", the Blueprint answers "here is what the federal government will do about it, and here is how we'll know it's working".
Done well, that relationship is complementary rather than competitive. The Blueprint doesn't set out to replace or reinterpret the national strategy's priorities. It gives the Commonwealth's own Action Plan a way to point back to those priorities and show its investments are pulling in the same direction as the rest of the sector, rather than running a parallel agenda.
Giving jurisdictions something to build against
State and territory health departments run their own digital health strategies, shaped by their own hospital systems, clinical priorities and budgets. A clear federal blueprint doesn't override that work, it gives it a stable foundation to build on. When jurisdictions can see what the Commonwealth is committed to over the next ten years, whether that's national infrastructure, standards or legislative change, they can plan their own investments with more confidence that the foundations underneath them will still be there in five years' time.
The Blueprint's Action Plan makes this concrete by naming delivery partners and tracking progress publicly. That transparency is itself a form of support for jurisdictional planning: departments can see not just federal intent, but federal progress, and adjust their own roadmaps accordingly.
Conclusion
A ten-year vision published by a single federal department can't, by itself, fix a fragmented digital health landscape. But it removes one common excuse for fragmentation: not knowing what the largest funder in the system is actually trying to achieve. The Digital Health Blueprint gives the Commonwealth, the states and territories, and the sector's own peak strategy a shared point of reference to work from.
That was the value I saw in the work: not a new competing strategy, but a clearer, longer-term account of how the federal government intends to hold up its end of a system that only works if every level of it is pulling the same way.
Read the Digital Health Blueprint at health.gov.au, and the ADHA's National Digital Health Strategy at digitalhealth.gov.au.