Melbourne-based licensed carrier Omniconnect has won the tender to provide the project's infrastructure, which will run from the South Australian border to Melbourne's western outskirts, covering a population of 210,000 in at least 40 towns and regional centres.
The GRHANet infrastructure will be based around a high-speed high-capacity integrated voice video and data communications service, with points of presence in hospitals and "customer connections" in non-hospital sites such as doctors surgeries, and pathology clinics.
According to Omniconnect, the project will both utilise and enhance the University of Ballarat network, which currently runs from Melbourne to Horsham. Connectivity will then be extended out to the regional centres across a "microwave-based backbone" and a range of wireless and terrestrial technologies.
The project was the brainchild of the Grampion region hospital IT alliance, and will be managed by the Collaborative Centre for ehealth at the University of Ballarat.
Centre director Ross Davey said the project is designed to provide dependable bandwidth and connectivity between healthcare providers in the region so as to improve the "continuum of care" across different health care services.
"The first and most basic thing is the communication of clinical data, medical data and patient histories between the different care providers," Davey said. "And then we can move on to the communication of visual material such as Xrays and offering video conferencing, which is the soft of facility a country GP can only dream about at the moment."
Once established the network also become available for commercial and educational uses across the region.
"Commercial usage will eventually finance and subsidise the health usage, and where possible the network will be made available for other purposes," Davey said.
