Berne Gibbons.
By 2026, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were to have “equal levels of digital inclusion”. That is Closing the Gap Target 17. The year ends in seven weeks. On the evidence, the target will be missed.
The target is being rewritten. A Target 17 Refresh Working Group has been set up, co-chaired by the Australian Government and the Coalition of Peaks. The First Nations Digital Inclusion Advisory Group calls it a chance to keep the target “meaningful, measurable, and aligned with Outcome 17”.
Digital health has treated this as a telecommunications problem. It’s also ours. So I start with one question:
When a person in a remote community gets online, can they reach their own health information and can the clinic that looks after them reach that information.
1. Target 17 counts connections, not information
Target 17 measures who is online which supports Outcome 17 which is about what people can do once they are. The advisory group has made that case for digital inclusion. Digital health should make the case for health information.
Outcome 17 is not about the number of connections. It is about people having the information and services they need for “informed decision-making regarding their own lives”.
The measure is narrower. The official dashboard draws on a survey question: has this person used the internet in the last three months?
The gap is still wide. Getting online is also expensive. Surveyed households spent an average of $345 a month on mobile and internet. 83% had cut back on essentials to pay for it.
None of these figures tells us whether one piece of health information reached the person it belongs to.
“Target 17 underpins many other targets, including health,” says Professor Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Co-Chair of the advisory group. “Being digitally included is an enabler for accessing health and other specialist services, especially for our regional and remote communities.”
2. “Remote comes last”
South Australia finished its statewide electronic medical record in 2025. The final sites were Coober Pedy and Oodnadatta. In Far North Queensland, Mareeba was the last of nine rural hospitals to go digital, in May 2025. Both are achievements. Both also show the order. Traditionally rollouts have not started with the remote sites which strongly benefits from the information being digitized for remote access.
There are reasons. Bandwidth. Old buildings. Small teams. The people who wait longest are the ones who travel furthest for care.
3. The patient travels. The record doesn’t
Picture a woman from a remote community, flown to a city hospital for cancer treatment. Weeks later she is home. Her care now sits with the local clinic, often an Aboriginal community-controlled health service. The clinic is waiting on the hospital for her medicines list and her follow-up plan, that may or may not arrive.
A 2025 study of cancer care for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory interviewed 50 staff across 15 health services. It found hospital and clinic IT systems that could not talk to each other, so patient information arrived late or not at all. The paper’s title quotes one of them: “We Just Get Whispers Back”.
An earlier Queensland audit looked at records from 2010 to 2016. It found 36.5% of Indigenous cancer patients had no discharge summary in their primary care notes.
The hospital has an EMR. The clinic has its own system. The patient has a phone. Nothing joins them together.
4. “No connectivity” no longer explains it
The standard answer is that remote communities are not connected. That is less true every year. People are getting online faster than their health information is reaching them.
The federal government released its own analysis in October. It says closing the divide has the potential to improve access to health care through telehealth. It notes that transport and distance are among the reasons First Nations people go without medical help. It also admits that better health outcomes have not yet been conclusively shown.
Connection is the precondition. What travels across it is our job.
Questions for our own sector
Three questions for every health service board and digital health executive:
(a) In our rollout plan how do we prioritize those communities get while they wait?
(b) When a patient from a remote community leaves our hospital, how long before their clinic has the discharge information? Do we measure it?
(c) Can that patient see their own results and medicines on devices they already own?
Back the people already doing the work
The advisory group has done its part. Its 2026 progress report says closing the gap will take significant ongoing investment. It says the approaches that work reflect local priorities and come from dealing directly with communities. It wants the refreshed target to line up with Outcome 17.
Professor Ormond-Parker and his co-chair, Dot West, are right. Our sector should say so and support them.
That means two things. Support the refresh, and the investment the advisory group is asking for. And answer the three questions above, so that when people in remote communities get connected, their health information is there to meet them.
Viewpoint articles are the author’s opinion, produced without payment or sponsorship.
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