Bush babies broadband : on-demand virtual neonatal intensive care unit support for regional Australia

The care of premature and ill term babies born in regional Australia differs considerably from those born in metropolitan areas for without access to a Neonatologist, the baby must be moved to another hospital with Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) facilities. This paper details the Bush Babies Broadband project that aims to address this need by significantly improving the quality of treatment for babies born in regional and remote areas by providing the first on-demand virtual NICU architecture in Australia. Real-time data collected from medical monitors and ventilators attached to the baby, audiovisual streams and static physiological data such as x-ray images are transmitted to the consulting Neonatologist to gain a better picture of the patient’s condition than is currently available. The key contribution of this significant research is the infrastructure providing a mechanism for Neonatologists to receive information directly from a regional hospital, thereby preventing, in some cases, the immediate need to move the baby. A key benefit of this framework is that it is available to link regional hospitals with the supporting NICU Neonatologist ‘on demand’ eliminating the need to establish permanent point to point connections. This paper further describes the application of that architecture to a specific pilot connecting the Bathurst regional hospital with Neonatologists within the NICU at Nepean Hospital, Penrith, Australia