Telehealth is a rapidly growing field, with developments in all Australian States and Territories and New Zealand. In the complex environment of the health system, strenuous efforts must be made to establish meaningful statistics and data against which the costs and benefits of new initiatives can be measured and compared with alternative approaches. Since its establishment in 1996 the Australian New Zealand Telehealth Committee has been actively engaged in developing a standard and system-wide approach to monitoring and evaluation that will meet both project and strategic needs. The Committee has developed a national telehealth evaluation framework that incorporates a standard approach to project evaluation, and conducts an annual survey of telehealth activity across Australia. In conjunction with the Department of Health and Aged Care, the Committee is currently pursuing the development and trial of a generic evaluation methodology to establish the relative clinical and cost-effectiveness of key telehealth applications. Important work is also being done in the area of data definitions, with elaboration of a telehealth data framework and development of a set of standard telehealth data definitions, and ongoing work towards a national minimum data set and performance indicators for telehealth
