Victoria extends rural telehealth trial

The initial $5.2 million trial was funded in accordance with the Federal Government's $118.6 million Clever Networks initiative and took place from June 2008 across hospitals in Mildura, Swan Hill, Machuka and Bendigo, connected to four metropolitan hospitals in Melbourne. The trial involved the deployment of eight mobile Virtual Trauma and Critical Care Units and seven fixed units across the regional hospitals, along with software and smart vitals devices from a consortium of companies including Telstra, Cerner, KPMG and Polycom.

The units were connected

The units were connected by a 100 megabits per second link provided by Telstra, running separately to the hospitals' existing networks in order to avoid potential congestion.

"There's a lack of specialists in regional Australia," the alliance's CIO, Bruce Winzar, told Computerworld Australia. "So traditionally what they would do is probably get on the telephone with the specialist and have a telephone discussion. "We were trying to bring scarce resources like specialists out of the metropolitan areas and bring them into the regional and rural areas via high definition videoconferencing, coupled with broadband links and a lot of application software.

The business case

"Deep down the business case was around trying to prove whether the innovation works and secondly whether there was a sustainability in the sense that we can minimise transfers between country areas and metropolitan areas."

As the units only require roughly five megabits per second for high definition video conferencing, the units will deployed on the existing networks of the new trial hospitals with Quality of Service prioritising video and each clinic's VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems above other data. The 100Mbps links at the four trial hospitals have been scaled back to 20Mbps.

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