State of Online GP in Australia 2026

Key findings

• 59.7% of consults sought clinical care for a health problem; 40.3% were continuing-care services. A consult counts as clinical only when the patient asked for the problem itself to be assessed or treated; consults booked solely to obtain a repeat script, a certificate, a test, or a referral are counted as services, even when an illness is named as the reason.
• Prescription renewals were the single most common reason for an online GP consult, at 16.9%, followed by medical certificates at 13.3%. With referrals, letters & forms (5.4%), tests & scans (2.8%), and a small residual of other administrative requests (1.9%), continuing-care services accounted for 40.3% of consults.
• Respiratory illness was the most common clinical reason Australians sought care from NewDoc's online GPs in April 2026, at 13.9% of all consults (cold, flu, viral illness, and COVID combined).
• Mental health was the second most common clinical reason at 7.7% of all consults, covering Mental Health Treatment Plans, anxiety, depression, and related presentations, ahead of musculoskeletal problems (7.1%).
• Median wait time from booking to consult was 5.0 hours. Most Australians using NewDoc were seen the same waking day they booked.
• 0.7% of consults showed clinical red-flag features warranting same-day in-person or ED escalation, after the production urgency tags were mapped to ACEM's Australasian Triage Scale (ATS). About 93% presented as low or moderate clinical urgency, the case mix online GP is best suited to.
• Demand peaks late morning (10am–2pm Sydney time) with a clear second peak after hours (6–10pm), consistent with patients booking either inside their working day or after-hours.

Top 10 reasons Australians use NewDoc's online GP service

NewDoc pre-consults across Australia in April 2026, classified by an LLM-aided pipeline. Clinical categories count only consults where the patient sought care for the problem itself; consults booked solely for a document or service are reported under the service category. The top 10 reporting categories below account for roughly 84% of all presentations; the long tail spans body-system categories like neurological, dental, endocrine, sleep, cardiovascular, allergy, and eye/vision.

Period: 1 April – 1 May 2026. Shares are computed against the full classified pre-consult cohort. "Most common in category" names the single sub-category with the highest share inside each category. There are roughly five other sub-categories per category on average. Revised 11 June 2026: figures re-issued under the purpose-of-consult rule described in Methodology; the original edition counted document-only consults toward the condition named in the document, which overstated clinical categories.

How urgent are the issues Australians consult NewDoc about?

The 3,284 NewDoc pre-consults from April 2026 were re-classified against the Australasian Triage Scale (ATS), the standard Australian clinical-urgency framework published by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine. A consult is mapped to the top band (ATS 1–2) only when the presenting features include clinical red flags that would warrant ED triage in person: suspected stroke, GI bleed, sepsis, severe respiratory distress, ophthalmic emergency, or acute mental health crisis with imminent risk. Patient-stated "urgent" on its own (common with same-day script or certificate requests) does not qualify.

About 93% of consults mapped to ATS 4 or ATS 5 (semi-urgent or non-urgent), the case mix online GP is well-suited to assess and manage. The remaining 7% mapped to ATS 1–3, including the 0.7% mapped to ATS 1–2 warranting same-day in-person or emergency assessment.

How long Australians wait for a NewDoc consult

Across the NewDoc consult sample in April 2026, the median wait time from booking to the scheduled consult was 5.0 hours. The majority of patients were seen the same waking day they booked, and only about 1 in 10 waited longer than 24 hours.

Wait time here is defined as the difference between the moment a booking was created and the scheduled consult start time. It captures user-experienced wait, including patients who deliberately chose a future slot rather than the earliest available.

For context, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Patient Experience Survey reports that around 1 in 4 Australians who needed urgent GP care in 2022–23 waited 24 hours or more for an appointment, comparable to NewDoc's >24-hour tail, with the bulk of NewDoc consults completed inside the same waking day.

When Australians book a NewDoc consult

Booking demand follows a clear two-peak pattern across the day. The largest peak runs late morning into early afternoon (around 10am to 2pm Sydney time), and a second, smaller peak appears in the after-hours evening window (around 6pm to 10pm).

The pattern is consistent with primary-care utilisation studies showing patients book either inside the working day or in the after-hours window once the day's other commitments are done. Demand is lowest overnight and into the early morning.

Who uses NewDoc

Across NewDoc's active patient base in 2026, women made up the majority of consult-takers and the platform served patients in every Australian state and territory.

Patients have used NewDoc from all eight Australian states and territories: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory.

Gender share is computed from a sample of recent active NewDoc patient profiles with a recorded gender; profiles with no recorded gender are excluded from the share calculation. Age data is not published because NewDoc's analytics interface treats date of birth as PII and does not surface it in aggregate queries.

Methodology

• Sample. Australian residents who completed a NewDoc pre-consult or booked a NewDoc appointment between 1 April – 1 May 2026. Aggregate figures are computed from the full classified pre-consult cohort and from an appointment sample drawn over the same period; exact sample sizes are not published in order to keep the report at the level of utilisation pattern rather than operational reporting.
• Reason classification. Each pre-consult free-text presenting complaint was classified by an LLM-aided pipeline into one of 88 sub-categories, rolled up into reporting categories along two axes: body system / clinical domain (e.g. Respiratory & ENT, Mental Health, Women's Health) and service type (Prescription renewals, Medical certificates, Tests & scans, Referrals/letters). Precedence follows the purpose of the consult: a consult counts toward a clinical category only when the patient sought assessment or treatment of that problem in the consult. A consult whose only ask is a document or transactional service is classified by the service, even when a condition is named as the reason for it; a request that combines a service with a genuine care ask counts as clinical. Borderline calls were resolved by reading the full request text, and ambiguous service-bucket records were individually reviewed. The classification taxonomy and prompts are versioned in NewDoc's internal pre-consult-classifier repository.
• Revision history. First published 15 May 2026 using condition-first precedence, under which a consult booked only to document an illness (for example a sick-leave certificate citing a cold) was counted toward that condition's clinical category. Re-issued 11 June 2026 under the purpose-of-consult precedence described above, which moved roughly one in five consults from clinical categories to service categories and is the convention all NewDoc research now uses. The underlying records, sample window, and taxonomy are unchanged.
• Clinical urgency re-classification. The production classifier originally tagged each pre-consult with low / moderate / high / urgent urgency, but those tags conflated patient-perceived urgency ("I need this script today") with clinical red-flag urgency. For this report, every record originally tagged urgent or high (295 of 3,284) was re-classified against the Australasian Triage Scale (ATS), published by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the standard Australian clinical-urgency framework. ATS was originally developed for in-person ED triage with vital signs and clinical examination; there is no canonical Australian primary-care equivalent, so ATS is used here as the closest published reference adapted to pre-consult text triage. Bands map as: ATS 1–2 (resuscitation / emergency) to "urgent", ATS 3 (urgent) to "high", ATS 4 (semi-urgent) to "moderate", and ATS 5 (non-urgent) to "low". The pre-existing low and moderate tags from the production classifier were retained, with 50 records originally tagged urgent/high downgraded to moderate and 14 admin-only urgency cases rolled into low.
• Wait time definition. Booking-to-consult wait time is the difference between the booking-record creation timestamp and the scheduled consult start time. It captures user-experienced wait, including patients who chose a future slot rather than the earliest available.
• Demographic snapshot. Gender and state coverage are computed from a sample of the most recently active NewDoc patient profiles drawn in mid-May 2026, filtered to profiles with a Medicare billing type. This is a snapshot of NewDoc's current user base rather than the April pre-consult cohort; demographics shift slowly relative to month-over-month consult patterns.
• No personally identifiable information appears in the figures above or in the published Dataset record. Aggregates are computed from pseudonymous records.
• Period boundary. April 2026 was chosen because (a) it falls inside an Australian autumn-to-winter respiratory transition window relevant to the leading clinical category, and (b) it pre-dates this report's publication date, so the data is closed.

Limitations

• Not a population sample. The cohort is NewDoc patients, not all Australians. Findings should be cited as "Australians using NewDoc's online GP service" rather than "Australians generally".
• Single-month window. Respiratory-illness presentations are seasonal; a January or July sample would shift the clinical-category mix. The report will be re-issued annually to track that movement.
• Wait time is bookable-slot-bound. Median wait reflects the slot density NewDoc currently offers; if availability changes (more doctors, longer hours), the median can shift independently of demand.
• Demographic cohort differs. Gender and state-coverage findings are drawn from a current-active-patient snapshot rather than from the April pre-consult cohort. They are presented as descriptive context for NewDoc's user base, not as a strict overlap with the consult-level numbers.
• LLM-aided classification has a small residual error rate. Category and sub-category shares are stable within roughly ±2 percentage points on spot-check against human-rater agreement.
• Clinical urgency is a triage signal, not an outcome. The urgency figures reflect the clinical features of the presenting issue at pre-consult triage, not whether escalation actually happened, and not the result of the consult. Borderline cases were classified conservatively (downgraded when the clinical features were ambiguous), so the published 0.7% urgent share is a lower-bound estimate of red-flag presentations.

How to cite this report

Data published under the same terms of use as the rest of newdoc.com.au. Aggregated figures may be quoted with attribution. For collaboration, anonymised data extracts, or a methodology deep-dive, contact research@newdoc.com.au.

Companion report

For the wait-time comparison between NewDoc telehealth and Australian emergency departments (including state-by-state ED variance and AIHW comparators), see Telehealth vs Emergency Department Wait Times in Australia 2026.