In mid-March, when most of us went into isolation, Silvia Pfeiffer was running on adrenaline and minimal sleep.

The telehealth start-up she'd been working on since being hired by the CSIRO in 2012 was suddenly part of the Federal Government's strategy in fighting COVID-19.

Dr Pfeiffer is a computer scientist and the co-founder of Coviu, a healthcare videoconferencing platform. A day after Health Minister Greg Hunt announced telehealth would become a Medicare item, the fledging company took off. "We went from doing 400 or 300 consultations a day to doing 25,000 consultations a day within the course of two weeks," Dr Pfeiffer tells ABC RN's The Money. "We've probably accelerated our growth expectations from what we would do over the next five years to having done all of that within two weeks."

The number of medical practices using the software went from about 400 practices to 12,000 in three months. The company rushed to employ and train more staff to help health professionals use the new subscription-based system.

Unlike platforms like Zoom and Skype, Coviu doesn't require the user to install any software. "You basically just click on a link in a web browser and you can set up a video call, Dr Pfeiffer says.

"When you come in as a patient, it's a bit like going to a doctor's office. The practice sees that you're waiting and can start triaging you, can take your Medicare details, put you back on hold until the clinician is ready for you."

The program also has specific artificial intelligence tools. For example, physiotherapists using Coviu are able to measure a patients' range of movement with a drawing tool, applied to the patients' arm or leg as they appear in the video. Telehealth helps patients avoid the travel and time required to attend a GP clinic, and opens up access to people in rural areas.

Dr Pfeiffer predicts that in the future, digital devices to measure blood pressure or temperature "will be in everybody's hands, in their homes". "And you'll be able to do some of these diagnostics that the clinicians are doing in their offices also from home."

Adapting in real time

Coviu's success is part of a push by the CSIRO's innovation fund, Main Sequence Ventures (MSeq), to invest in companies translating research into global-scale businesses. MSeq is Coviu's main investor. It was launched by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 to commercialise early stage innovations from CSIRO, universities and other publicly funded research bodies.

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This article was originally published via ABC News on 8 August 2020. Original article link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/coronavirus-boosts-telehealth-start-up-coviu-business/12519234