From Silos to Smarter Search and Self-service Tools

The Challenge

Healthdirect Australia provides trusted health information and services to millions of Australians through websites, helplines, symptom checkers, and directories. However, their digital ecosystem was fragmented — content was spread across over 280 partner organizations, siloed medicine databases, and service directories.

This made it difficult to deliver unified, user-friendly experiences. Content updates were manual, data ingestion was complex, and scalability was limited. With increasing demand, the organization needed a better way to unify information, improve discoverability, and power smarter self-service tools.

The Solution

To unify this fragmented ecosystem, Healthdirect partnered with Semantic Web Company and Ontotext — now merged under Graphwise. They gradually adopted what became the comprehensive Graphwise’s Graph AI Suite to transform their infrastructure into a semantic knowledge graph.

The journey began by developing health-specific vocabularies based on MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), customized for the Australian context. These vocabularies, alongside custom metadata schemas, formed the foundation for automated content classification and enrichment.

By integrating the Thesaurus Manager into the organization’s Alfresco content management system (CMS), Healthdirect was able to semantically classify content at creation. These classifications enriched the knowledge graph and were centrally managed for easy review and updates.

Over time, Healthdirect extended this setup with data pipelines that ingest, transform, and semantically link structured and unstructured information across hundreds of sources. This enabled:

• Dynamic content generation for thousands of medicine pages powered by structured data
• Context-aware search and navigation across all services and partner content
• Scalable API-based delivery integrated into their digital infrastructure

The suite now serves as a centralized, cloud-native layer for managing taxonomies, metadata, and semantic relationships across Healthdirect’s entire ecosystem.

The Impact

With the Graphwise’s Graph AI Suite, Healthdirect achieved:

• Automated classification, reduced manual effort, and simplified metadata management across 280+ partners
• Faster, more accurate content discovery for both users and support teams in natural language
• Reduced pressure on call centers through smarter self-service tools
• Improved customer satisfaction through better search, navigation, and content access
• A scalable foundation for innovation across all digital health services (e.g. content discovery)

What began as a content classification project has become a strategic platform underpinning Healthdirect’s digital health ecosystem. This has improved user experience, reduced operational overhead, and laid the foundation for AI-enhanced services.