Bringing the emergency department into your lounge room

When we think of emergency care, we tend to think of a physical place: ambulances arriving, waiting rooms, cubicles and clinicians working under enormous pressure. But does every patient who needs urgent assessment need to begin their care inside an emergency department?

The Virtual Emergency Department (VED) challenges that assumption.

Its guiding principle is straightforward: delivering the right care, at the right time, in the right place. Rather than simply reproducing an emergency department consultation on a screen, VED creates different pathways through which patients can access emergency expertise.

Patients may enter the service through self-referral, Ambulance Victoria, residential aged care facilities, general practitioners and specialists, or other health services. Following virtual nurse triage or clinician consultation, some patients can receive care in place or be referred to another appropriate service, while those requiring physical emergency care can still be transferred to an ED.

That distinction matters. Virtual emergency care is not necessarily about replacing the ED. It is about reconsidering whether the ED is always the right place for care to begin.

More than a virtual consultation

VED's evolution illustrates how quickly a digital model can move from an innovative idea towards a more integrated component of the health system.

The service has progressively expanded its pathways and reach, including partnerships involving Ambulance Victoria, residential aged care, urgent care services and Nurse-on-Call. It expanded to 24-hour operation and statewide delivery, including regional and rural Ambulance Victoria pathways.

The scale is striking. VED presentation material reports growth from 103,190 presentations in 2022–23 to 195,306 in 2023–24. In 2023–24, the service also reported 15,990 avoided ramping events and estimated capacity savings equivalent to 32 ED cubicles and 41 occupied beds.

Numbers tell only part of the story.

The more interesting lesson may be how VED changes the patient journey. Instead of asking how we can use technology to recreate an existing service, virtual emergency care invites a different question: where should this patient's care actually occur?

For doctors, that means thinking about virtual care as part of an interconnected clinical pathway — linking emergency departments with ambulance services, general practice, aged care, urgent care and other parts of the health system — rather than as a stand-alone telehealth service.

What VED teaches us about transformation

This was the question we explored during a National Science Week 2026 event on 21 Aug 2026 at La Trobe University, where VED provided a real-world example of digital health science in action. We paired its story with another question that receives considerably less attention: who makes digital transformation happen?

Our discussion reinforced that digital health is where science, technology and people come together. Innovation requires identifying a health care problem, designing and implementing a solution, evaluating what works and what does not, and having a workforce capable of adapting the model as needs change.

That workforce is increasingly diverse.

Some enter digital health through clinical practice, others through technology, research, education, product development or implementation. Samantha Tudor's journey, for example, began in IT and project management. Her experience in health care led her towards digital health and a desire to bridge clinicians and technology to improve patient outcomes. Rob Park’s journey came from the other direction — through clinical practice. As a GP, educator, researcher and innovator, his work now spans general practice, digital health, AI, research and education. Together, their stories illustrate that the digital health workforce is not one profession or pathway, but a multidisciplinary workforce bringing together clinical, technical, research and implementation expertise.

The skills involved are not purely technical. They include listening to health professionals, understanding evidence, bringing teams together, setting priorities, leading strategy and translating opportunities into solutions that improve care and patient safety. Clinicians working across practice, education, research and innovation similarly bring an important perspective to designing digital services around real clinical needs.

This may be VED's broader lesson for Australian health care.

An emergency department in the lounge room sounds like a story about technology. But technology is only the visible part of the transformation.

The deeper story is about redesigning care: starting with a health care problem, bringing together clinical and digital expertise, creating new connections across traditional boundaries, and continually learning as the model evolves.

As virtual models become a more familiar part of health care, the challenge is therefore not simply to ask what can we deliver digitally?

We should also ask: what care are we trying to improve, where should that care happen, and do we have the people and systems needed to make the change work?

Loren Sher, MBBCh, DCH, FACEM, PEM is Clinical Director of the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department, Northern Health; PhD Candidate, School of Public Health, La Trobe University; Fellow, Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, with specialist expertise in Paediatric Emergency Medicine, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Samantha Tudor, MDH, PMP® is Senior Product Manager, Perioperative Portfolio, Medtronic, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Rob Park, BSc (Biomed), MBBS, MClinEd, FRACGP, FFPMANZCA is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Clinical Education, School of Medicine and Dentistry, Griffith University; General Practitioner and Specialist Pain Medicine Physician, Queensland, Australia.

Urooj Raza Khan, Professional Doctorate of IT (Digital Health), MSc, BSc, FAIDH is Senior Lecturer and Digital Health Course Lead, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.