[LINK] How far the fibre?

[Antony Barry]

Begin forwarded message:

>
> From: Paul Brooks <paul-link at layer10.com.au>
> Date: 4 July 2007 2:25:48 PM
> To: Craig Sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
> Cc: LINK <link at anu.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [LINK] How far the fibre?
>
>
> Craig Sanders wrote:
>> not very useful for acute appendicitis, or a car crash, or  
>> poisoning or any of the many other things that require on-the-spot  
>> expertise, right now...rather than booked days or weeks in  
>> advance. not terribly useful for surgery, either. even if tele- 
>> operated devices became good enough to be useful for general  
>> surgery, it would require a huge investment in the required  
>> equipment....and that just isn't going to happen in a tiny remote  
>> community, any more than the govt. is going to build a fully  
>> equipped hospital in a tiny remote community.
> Tiny remote communities are just the sort of place that would  
> benefit from infrastructure to allow the local people-on-the-ground  
> to consult remote expertise immediately, rather than taking days or  
> weeks to post off photos of the condition for an expert opinion, or  
> transporting the patient to a larger centre.
> I was recently involved in evaluating the effectiveness of a secure  
> VPN, consisting of satellite links, ADSL, and direct 'fibre  
> links' (actually 2 Mbps symmetric transmission of some sort) run to  
> many doctors surgeries, hospitals, clinics, and doctors homes, in  
> the far flung Eastern Goldfields area around Kalgoorlie in WA.
>
> "The Reference Site has been established in the area serviced by  
> the Eastern Goldfields Medical Division of General Practice and  
> Goldfields South East Health Region in Western Australia. This area  
> includes the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and the surrounding region,  
> from the inland town of Wiluna in the north, to the coastal town of  
> Esperance in the south (~ 1/3 of WA). The area covers typical rural  
> and remote conditions, with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder  
> mirroring metro-like conditions."
>
> Some of the outcomes that were found to be of the greatest benefit  
> were the easiest things that bringing broadband could be expected  
> to solve.
>     With broadband connected, surgeries could process medicare  
> transactions online instantly, rather than post off paper-based  
> returns with turnaround times of weeks
>     One doctor cited the ability to look up travel advisories to  
> determine what vaccinations might be required 'on the spot', rather  
> than having take down the information in one consultation, paw  
> through multiple paper-based or other references offline, and  
> require the patient to come back later when the information was  
> known. This is a major improvement when the patient might have to  
> travel for several hours to get to the clinic.
>     Some of them really did use webcam-based videoconferencing to  
> identify and get opinions on skin disorders
>     Email was the most valuable application - bringing usable email  
> capability to someone trying to work without it with faxes and such.
>     Satellite (two-way) connections didn't work so well
> The information on the project is at http://www.health.gov.au/ 
> internet/wcms/publishing.nsf/Content/health-ehealth-broadband- 
> reference.htm
>
> The 'lessons learnt' document is also linked there - make sure you  
> grab the PDF versions (~300 KB in size) rather than the RTF  
> versions (~3.5 MB in size) though!
>
>
> Paul.