Australia - National Broadband Network - E-Health

Synopsis

Healthcare is starting to shape up as a major driving force for the NBN.

If we truly want to see benefits for our society from the NBN, healthcare would be the key sector to look at.

On the other side of the coin, the healthcare reforms that will push e-health to people in their homes depend, to a large extent, on the national coverage afforded by the NBN.

BuddeComm estimates that in a fully-deployed NBN, a quarter of all the services over the network will be healthcare-related, in a combination of public and private services. So e-health over the NBN will open up an entire new e-health industry. We have already seen both Telstra and NEC sign lucrative deals with healthcare organisations for the development of e-health services, once the first of a set of healthcare reform policies were implemented.

With a far more open access model, private healthcare services will proliferate over the new broadband network. E-health will transform the industry, changing the focus of the sector from the hospital to the home.

With the uncertainty of the NBN under the new government, the future of some of these projects will also be uncertain. Furthermore, the delays in the roll out of the NBN have also resulted in delays for many of the project listed in this report.