Our journey

​Attend Anywhere has been at the leading edge of adopting video technology in the health sector for many years. Here is our story.

​A history in telehealth

Chris Ryan founded Attend Anywhere in Melbourne, Australia in 1998 after installing 100 video conferencing systems in hospitals across country Victoria. 

The idea of the video conferencing systems had been to increase access to urban-based mental health services, however they were not being used. Convinced of the value for patients, health systems and society, Attend Anywhere was formed around a vision to make video call access to health services business-as-usual.
 
Co-located with Monash University Faculty of Medicine at the Alfred Hospital for many years, Attend Anywhere realised that the key objective of programmes was making it easy for the provider of services (e.g. clinical teams) to say to their patients / clients 'yes you can attend via video'. 
 
Over time, Attend Anywhere forged the core principles of its enablement model so extensively adopted today, and developed the tools and resources to help health systems implement it.

The invention of the button

The Attend Anywhere Button makes travel optional for you and your patients. It is the simple, smart, and secure gateway to your online Waiting Areas and provides visitors with a single, consistent location for attending consultations.

​The first button was launched in 2011. It was the forebear of hundreds of buttons that exist on healthcare provider websites today, in various guises. 
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​Putting the button on your website gives callers confidence that, when they enter an online Waiting Area, the service they're attending is yours.

Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC)

Constantly at the forefront of innovation, Attend Anywhere helped pioneer the use of WebRTC for healthcare delivery.

WebRTC offers the best, most resilient video technology we have seen. The fact it is open-source, and travels between browsers and not through a data centre is a natural fit with our decentralised management model. WebRTC video offers many cost and quality advantages, especially for those in regional areas.
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The combination of a mature management platform and cutting-edge video technology has proven powerful, and produced one of the first entirely web-based video consulting platforms in the world.

Early version of the call screen in use by the Cystic Fibrosis team - Alfred Hospital, 2013

​A telehealth model grown in Victoria, Australia

The secret to mainstream adoption of video consulting lies primarily in the people and processes, rather than the technology. 

Attend Anywhere grew up in Victoria, and that has a lot to do with how the model has evolved. Victoria has a decentralised healthcare system; at the time, there were no shared technical networks or services, no telehealth departments and no shared finance systems.
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Our model is inbound, consumer-driven, and self-funded. Collaboration and co-design are at its heart, particularly with clinicians, clinic staff, and other program managers.

Healthdirect Australia

In 2012, Attend Anywhere was engaged by Government-owned Healthdirect Australia to establish the Healthdirect video consulting program (which became known as Healthdirect Video Call).
 
The Video Call program, which remains based on the Attend Anywhere model, achieved many firsts and added significant value for a fraction of the original budget. It also contributed significantly to the advancement of the video consultation sector in Australia.

In 2019, Attend Anywhere parted ways with Healthdirect, however, we continue to offer public hospitals and charities free licensing of the platform and resources. ​

NHS and Beyond

Example of a promotional video made for patients by NHS Scotland

In 2016, NHS Scotland ran a public tender for the provision of a patient-centric telehealth capability; Attend Anywhere responded.

The Scottish Government's Cabinet Secretary for Health launched nhs.attendanywhere in December 2016.
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The Attend Anywhere model has since been adopted widely across all of The Scottish Health System (service now branded Near Me), as well as widely throughout NHS England and Wales, HSE in Ireland and far beyond. As of October 2019, the model has been used to provide around 7 million video consultations a year across the UK and Ireland.

​Keeping ahead of the curve

It’s taken a long time for the technology to catch up with our vision, but the core values and principles of a decentralised, patient-centric model are more relevant today than ever.

​As technology evolves our framework and capabilities continue to improve through collaborations directly or indirectly with hundreds of healthcare providers in the public health sector and beyond.

Read the expanded version of our journey, in the words of CEO and Founder Chris Ryan, on Medium:  ​An accidental career in telehealth (opens in a new page).