Case Study: Austin Health achieves 75% patient engagement and scalable COVID-19 remote care with Azure Databricks

Combating COVID-19 with the help of data and machine learning

Austin Health, a tertiary and quaternary health service in Melbourne, faced unprecedented operational and safety challenges during the COVID‑19 pandemic: rapidly redesigning patient communication, keeping people physically separated, and shifting non‑critical care into the community while needing structured, secure data to support remote care and reduce hospital volumes.

Working with Arden Street Labs and Azure Databricks, Austin Health built an Azure Innovation Program that unified data ingestion, ETL and ML workflows using Delta Lake and secure, role‑based Databricks workspaces. The platform powered a suite of digital tools — including a self‑screening COVID Screen, appointment portal and at‑home monitoring — leading to 75–80% patient engagement, more than 100,000 screenings, and over 20,000 patients supported remotely, while reducing call‑center load and protecting frontline capacity.

Austin Health

Alan Pritchard

Director, EMR and ICT Services