Australia's clinical-AI quarter, from the public record.
Built from 10 independently-verified public datasets (see Methodology). Every figure is traceable to a government source and carries an as-at date. This brief reports what the public record shows — it makes no judgement about any product's quality, safety, value-for-money, or clinical effect.
Across the public record we can currently see, Australia's health system has committed ~$1.3 billion to health-IT in four jurisdictions — ~$0.5 billion of it digital-health-specific — and a pattern emerges that no single government portal shows: the same handful of vendors recur across state lines. Oracle/Cerner is bought in NSW, QLD and VIC (~$120M); Orion Health and Alcidion likewise span three states. Meanwhile the fastest-moving clinical-AI category — ambient documentation scribes — leaves almost no procurement trace at all, because it is sold by subscription below disclosure thresholds. The contract record tells you what the public system bought; it cannot tell you what clinicians are using. That gap is the reason this Observatory also has a verified-clinician layer.
Across the public record we can currently see, in clinical-AI & digital-health:
| Layer | Signal (this quarter's snapshot) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Funded (research) | ~$316M AI/digital-health-centric across 119 grants (of 158 matched / $423.5M broad) | MRFF #7 |
| Approved (regulator) | 1,430 FDA AI/ML device clearances; 14 AU/ANZ-founded (Annalise ×8, Artrya, Volpara, See-Mode) | FDA #3 |
| Bought (procurement) | ~$1.32B of state+federal health-ICT identified; ~$0.5B of that is digital-health-specific (rest is infrastructure/platform) | #1/#2/#11/#12 |
| Trialled | 55 AU clinical-AI trials, ~40–50% genuine AI, ~121 named sites | CT.gov #9 |
Procurement, by jurisdiction (multi-year contract totals, not annual spend):
| Jurisdiction | All health-ICT identified | Digital-health-specific core | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| NSW | ~$814.6M | ~$328M | one flagship program (SDPR ~$198M) + enterprise imaging (Sectra $98M) |
| VIC | ~$404.3M | ~$122M (~$85.5M ex-COVID) | federated, services-led; COVID test-trace ~$36M, EMPI/messaging ~$26M |
| QLD | ~$92.3M | ~$57M | Oracle/Cerner ieMR rollout dominant (2019–26 cumulative) |
| Federal | ~$4.2M | ~$3.5M | most federal health-IT is hidden under generic ICT line items |
Read this as a floor, not a ceiling. It is what leaves a public procurement trace in four jurisdictions. SA/WA/TAS/ACT/NT (beyond research grants), private-provider purchases, SaaS subscriptions and sub-threshold buys are not captured.
This is what no single government portal shows: the same vendor appearing across jurisdictions and lifecycle stages. You can explore the same picture interactively on the deployment radar.
Vendors bought by ≥2 states:
| Vendor | States | A$ (identified) | What |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle / Cerner | NSW · QLD · VIC | ~$120.4M | the EMR incumbent — bought in three states |
| Orion Health | NSW · QLD · VIC | ~$32.3M | health-information-exchange / EMPI — three states |
| Dedalus | NSW · QLD | ~$20.2M | clinical systems / eMeds |
| Fred IT / SafeScript | NSW · VIC | ~$15.6M | real-time prescription monitoring — both states run it |
| Agfa | NSW · QLD | ~$11.6M | enterprise imaging / PACS |
| Alcidion | NSW · QLD · VIC | ~$7.2M | patient-flow / virtual-care (Miya) — three states |
| (infrastructure: NTT ~$86.8M, Telstra ~$74.6M, Data#3 ~$36.6M span NSW+VIC — counted as health-ICT, not digital-health) | |||
The lifecycle trace — FDA-approved AND bought in Australia (imaging/device AI, the clearest funded→approved→bought→deployed signal): of 9 vendors FDA-cleared and bought here, Annalise.ai and Agfa are the only two visible at three stages (approved + bought + deployed); the other seven — Canon, Philips, Fujifilm, GE HealthCare, Varian, Siemens, Compumedics — are FDA-cleared and bought here but with no public deployment trace yet.
The procurement record has structural blind spots, and the gaps are themselves the finding:
Implication: the contract/registry layer (this brief) answers "what did the public system buy?" — but it cannot see the scribe boom, private deployments, or front-line experience. That is exactly the layer the verified clinician community is built to capture.
observatory-data/spine/ (records.json, entities.json, coverage.json); the interactive version is the deployment radar and the per-product directory.Every number above resolves to a per-product document in observatory-data/products/ (#1 federal, #2 QLD, #3 FDA, #4 ED performance, #5 vendor footprint, #6 lifecycle, #7 MRFF, #9 trials, #11 NSW, #12 VIC), each carrying its own source URLs, as-at date, and verification record.
Pre-publication checklist (per Observatory plan): (1) 1-hour defamation-lawyer eyeball — this brief reports public-record facts with citations and makes no quality/safety claims, which is the low-risk path; (2) confirm CC-BY attributions rendered; (3) coverage-honesty statement intact. Incorporated-association status is not required for a facts-only brief, but is required before the review/community layer goes live.