Pharmaceutical company Aventis has teamed up with Web developer HotHouse and Optus to provide Australian doctors with a free access to the Internet and its medical education portal, omnus.com.au. However the quality of Internet access that will be available to rural doctors will be lower than that available to their urban peers.
Optus will provide 3,000 doctors with free Internet access to use the portal as part of its contract with Aventis. Optus will make a range of access methods available including broadband cable, ADSL and dial-up connectivity.
However, according to Aventis, Optus will only be able to provide rural doctors with lower-bandwidth dial-up Internet access. Also, that means rural doctors wishing to use the service would have to absorb the cost of long-distance charges to connect to their nearest Optus point-of-presence.
"It's difficult, if there's no point-of-presence available, they're going to be dialling long distance," said Aventis project manager, Dean Comer. "We want rural doctors to access the site but that's not something we can control".
When asked why it didn't choose a carrier with a wider range of services or could provide free local call access, Aventis said it hadn't considered the option yet.
HotHouse managing director, Simon van Wyk, said Aventis established the portal to help doctors whose workload limits their capacity to attend face-to-face consultations with representatives of the pharmaceutical industry.
"We're not far enough down the path to able to investigate those sorts of details at the moment we're still in the early stages and consolidating what we're doing," said Comer.
According to Cromer the medical industry has always had a de-facto role as an educator keeping medical community and the public informed of advances the treatment of patients.
"There's so much technical information out there that you've got to educate the customers," said Comer. "All companies -- Aventis included -- will be porting a lot of money to ensuring the public and the medical community feel as though they're being educated in the best way possible."
Cromer concedes that the portal plays a role in Aventis' marketing but said that the company would be "shooting itself in the foot" if the site only steered doctors toward content that promotes its products.
Aventis said it consulted with the Royal Australian College General Practioners and an advisory body comprised of doctors and academics to shape the omnus.com.au's content. Doctors that sign up to the use the service will be gain access to content from paid online medical journals and information services.
Aventis should look at having more than one company to provide the service delivery. In South Australia, Internode provides Internet service at local call costs to users in all areas. If Rurual Doctors would use such a service, they would not need to spend money for long disatnce calls. The Commonwealth Government did provide substantial funding to make Internet access avalable in rural and remote areas. Rural Doctors should take advantage of this and Aventis should have done a little bit more research.