NBN to spur telemedicine says Cochlear clinic

Beverley Head
Monday, 10 May 2010 14:56

Business IT - Networking

The National Broadband Network will deliver much richer telemedicine capabilities allowing applications to be rolled out to 'deliver good quality care to people who could not get it without travelling to the city,' according to the head of IT at a Cochlear implant clinic.

Steve Pascoe, IT manager of the Sydney Cochlear Implant Centre (SCIC), said that suggestions that the higher bandwidth promised to the majority of Australia by the NBN was not yet needed were 'short sighted' and that business and health could be the big winners from the new network. Eventually he said that 100 Mbits per second 'will be nothing' compared to future generations of broadband network needed to underpin increasingly rich applications.

The Centre is currently working on a project which will allow specialist electro-physiologists to monitor patients' auditory brain stem responses to cochlear implants. In the past cochlear devices have been implanted, and only some time later when the patient recovered from surgery and the device was switched on was it clear whether the implant had worked.

Pascoe said that now electro-physiologists were able to determine whether there was an auditory brain stem response during the operation, to ensure that the device was accurately located, in a technique called mapping. He explained that the problem facing SCIC was the small team of electro physiologists, and their ability to travel to where operations were being conducted.

The SISC has now developed a way to remotely control the software that checks the auditory brain stem response, allowing remote mapping to take place. At present the SCIC is comparing the results of standard mapping and remote mapping, and should have the results by the end of the year, which will determine whether remote mapping can be offered to SCIC patients across NSW, or even internationally.

Pascoe has established a computer network to permit telemedicine applications to be developed and rolled out across the Centre's different offices, paying $3000 a month for the underpinning communications network. He hopes that the advent of the NBN will deliver access to much greater bandwidth at a similar price, allowing richer telemedicine applications to be rolled out.