Would you let a stranger make a decision about your health?
There was a time when healthcare felt personal—when your doctor knew your name, your history, and your family. That relationship was the foundation of quality care, bringing the peace of mind that comes from a trusted, continuous partnership. Yet today, for almost 7 million Australians without a regular GP, this tradition is now out of reach.
We’re here to bring it back.
Abby’s Challenge: Long-Term Care, On-Demand
At Abby Health, we refuse to be just another name on a prescription or a faceless voice on a call. We challenge the unsettling reality where crucial decisions affecting your health are made by someone who knows nothing about you. We’ve all experienced transactional telehealth appointments: a quick fix for today’s problem that leaves you right back at square one tomorrow.
We believe the future isn’t about choosing between a doctor who knows you and a doctor you can actually see. It’s about having both.
This is more than a business for us; it’s a calling. We saw a system straining patients and burning out doctors, and we refused to accept it as the new normal. So we built a new kind of clinic from the ground up, designed around a single, unbreakable promise: to provide every Australian with a dedicated clinical team empowered by a continuous health record, accessible whenever and wherever they need it.
Meet Abby, our Medical AI
This promise is powered by our medical AI, Abby—the intelligent engine driving our new standard of care. Before you even speak to your clinician, Abby prepares them for your consultation by:
- Instantly Triaging Urgency: Analysing your symptoms to determine if your issue needs immediate attention.
- Uncovering Critical Context: Asking smart, dynamic questions to build a comprehensive picture of your concern.
- Revealing Hidden Connections: Reviewing your medication history and personal health data to identify potential side effects, drug interactions, or underlying patterns.
- Predicting Future Risks: Analysing trends in your wellbeing over time to proactively flag potential issues before they escalate.
Crucially, this arms your clinician with a comprehensive brief, empowering their clinical expertise and allowing them to focus on you and next steps.
To see how this works in practice, consider these real-world examples:
A 30-year-old patient concerned about balding intends to start finasteride, a common hair-loss medication. However, he’s also mentioned in a previous appointment he’s trying for a baby, and finasteride can negatively impact fertility. Abby helps clinicians immediately identify and discuss these crucial implications, ensuring he makes a fully informed decision. Without this insight, the patient could have unknowingly jeopardised his family's plans.
With Abby, we ensure you never have to start from scratch again. Every conversation is a continuation of the last, providing your clinical team with the complete context needed to deliver genuinely personalised care.
And in cases when Abby identifies the need for a physical examination or procedure, it immediately prepares a detailed handover summary for a local in-person GP, ensuring no information or context is lost in transition.
"As a rural GP for 35 years, I know that not everything can be solved over a video call. Abby Health’s online-first model isn’t about avoiding in-person care; it’s about making sure it’s used for the right reasons. Our system safely identifies when a patient needs hands-on treatment. When that happens, we don’t just send them away. We provide a clear handover to their local GP or refer them to appropriate care, and we follow up with the patient after their treatment—ensuring continuity of care is never broken."
— Dr. Ramu Nachiappan,
Medical Director
For Our Founders, It’s Personal
For us, this isn’t just a crisis in the headlines; it’s the heart of our story.
For Charlie, our co-founder, it meant witnessing the healthcare system fail his father, who lived rurally with complex medical conditions. His father desperately needed a consistent GP who fully understood his ongoing diagnosis and treatment plan. Without continuity, managing his health became unnecessarily challenging. Charlie’s experience reflects a critical issue for millions of Australians with chronic or mental health conditions, for whom personalised care is not just beneficial - it’s essential.
For co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ramu's decades of frontline experience as a General Practitioner in Broken Hill exposed the frustration of striving to deliver quality care without complete access to patient histories - a significant contributor to clinician burnout nationwide.
The Crisis in Primary Care
A perfect storm is pushing the traditional clinic to its breaking point. Imagine urgently needing help but waiting over 24 hours just to speak to a GP. In just the last year, the cost of seeing a GP rose by 14% as Medicare rebates failed to keep pace with inflation. This financial pressure has forced (~9%) of Australians to avoid the doctor altogether. Nearly half (46%) now wait 24 hours or more for urgent appointments, and almost a third (32%) can’t see their preferred GP, eroding the continuity crucial to effective medicine.
When primary care is inaccessible, manageable conditions escalate and diagnoses are delayed. Overloaded emergency departments become the default, forcing patients through fragmented, impersonal appointments that erode the trust and understanding foundational to healthcare.
At Abby Health, we directly respond to these challenges by offering bulk billed (where possible), same-day appointments, reducing wait times, and ensuring continuity by connecting every visit into a single, evolving medical record.
Looking Forward
The traditional family GP may seem out of reach, but the principle it was built on - a clinician who deeply understands your story - is still possible.
This is more than a new model of care. It’s a movement to restore peace of mind, built around doctors who know your history and ask the right questions. We are reimagining the entire healthcare journey - from an intelligent assessment that brings clarity, to personalised care from a clinician who understands your story before you even say hello.
To reclaim what we once had, we must reimagine the future. At Abby Health, it begins with a simple, unbreakable promise: we will never let you start your story from scratch again. This is long-term care, on-demand.
