Rural Access and Digital Health with Matt Vickers, Chief Medical Officer of Hims Australia

Matt Vickers, FRACGP, MBBS, BMedSci, AICGG, grew up in a small town in rural Australia where the local GP was, for a lot of people, the only doctor they'd ever see. That experience shaped his path to practicing family medicine, eventually drawing him to digital health, and now to Hims Australia. We sat down with Dr. Vickers, Chief Medical Officer of Hims Australia, to talk about access, choice, and what personalized care should actually look like.

What first drew you to practicing medicine, and eventually to digital health?

I grew up in a small town in rural Australia, and our local doctor was something close to larger-than-life to me. I always wanted to follow in his footsteps. But once I was practicing family medicine myself, I saw how much distance there still was between what people needed and what the system was built to give them.

As a GP working within Australia's public healthcare system, what gap did you start to notice between what patients needed and what the system was built to offer?

Australian healthcare runs almost entirely on rebates and reimbursement, and that shapes everything, including how much choice a patient actually has in how or where their care is delivered. I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to give patients more options and more choices in their healthcare both in my own practice and through government advocacy.

‍What made you believe digital health could close that gap — and what drew you to Hims & Hers specifically?

What drew me to this work was the personalized, doctor-led model of care I got to help build at Eucalyptus. When Hims & Hers acquired Eucalyptus, that model gained real scale across the platform, the clinical infrastructure, and the backing to reach more patients across Australia. The opportunity to keep building the same kind of care, at a size that actually matches the access problem is what brought me here.

What can a platform like Hims & Hers do for rural and regional Australians that the traditional system can't?

Rural Australia has a chronic shortage of care and worse health outcomes to show for it. The area I grew up in has some of the highest rates of obesity, chronic disease, and coal mining–related lung disease in the country, and it's badly underresourced from a healthcare perspective. Too much of someone's health is still determined by where they live. Digital health helps close that gap, but only if it’s built to evolve with patients over time. At Hims Australia, we run clinical audits and quality checks and bring patient feedback straight back to our clinicians, so expanding access never means lowering the bar on how that care is delivered.

If you had one message for an Australian patient who's never used a platform like ours, what would you want them to know?

Choice is one of the most powerful things in healthcare. You should be able to get safe, appropriate care in a way that actually fits your life, alongside the care you already get elsewhere. How your care is delivered should be up to you. That's what personalized care actually means.

As Chief Medical Officer, what does democratizing access to personalized care look like in practice?

It starts with the standards behind the platform. I'm continuing to lead the work on telehealth accreditation standards in Australia, because access without quality isn't good enough. From there, it's continuously building out our services so more people can get more personalized care, with a wider set of treatment options across more specialties. And it's growing our research partnerships — co-designing new public research projects with health systems and partners here, so we're building the evidence for personalized care alongside the access to it.