Patients and technology: improving access to healthcare

Access to healthcare is an essential driver of population health outcomes. But what does access mean? A brief consideration of this question reveals that access is more complex than the availability of services. One of the more encompassing conceptualisations of access has been posited by Levesque, Harris and Russell.1 For these authors, access has five dimensions: approachability (awareness about the existence of a service, how to reach it, and what it can achieve), acceptability (social and cultural factors that affect uptake of a service), availability and accommodation (ability to reach the service in an appropriate time frame), affordability (ability to pay for services) and appropriateness (the degree to which the service meets individuals' needs).

Satisfying each dimension presents an enormous challenge for any health system. We know that even in Australia, which by global standards has excellent overall population health outcomes, many groups encounter barriers to access in one or more of these dimensions, resulting in various health inequities. Technology presents us with unprecedented opportunities to overcome some of these barriers to access, offering novel means of seeking knowledge, connecting with patients, and...