IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The potential impact of smart city initiatives is colossal. PwC pegged it as a $2.5 trillion opportunity by 2025. But getting projects greenlit for long term deployment can be quite difficult, especially with budget shortfalls. A successful deployment of a smart city project near Sydney, Australia, can be instructive for how local governments can get the ball rolling.

Parramatta is a major commercial suburb of Sydney, and the second-oldest city in the country. Following the Great Recession, a large pharmaceutical company moved out of town, leading developers to propose building a large housing complex on the former campus. When neighbors raised concerns about the impact of construction noise and dust in the heart of the city, planners required the developers to deploy a series of sensors to monitor air quality and noise levels.

A Commonwealth funded trial is linking Canberra Hospital's emergency department and helicopter base with public hospitals in Queanbeyan, Moruya, Batemans Bay and Cooma.

A spokesman for the New South Wales Health Minister Jillian Skinner says the program allows for funding of a further four sites.

NSW councils' operating costs have risen eleven-fold in the past 30 years, while capital expenditure has only doubled in that period, a report by former Treasury head Percy Allan for the Urban Taskforce reveals.

Residents are urged to register for an eHealth record which will allow them to access a summary of their important health information online and share that information with healthcare professionals.

Until now, health records have usually been stored in different locations with little connection to each other, your general practitioner, specialist or hospitals.

A NSW region of six cities has joined together to accelerate economic growth and lead the way for smart city development in Australia

Back in 2015 and 2016, I took a number of smart city initiatives aimed at lifting the issue of smart cities to the senior levels of the dozen or so councils I was working with. What had been the case in previous years was that the concept of smart cities (enhancing liveability, social structures and economic development with the assistance of new technologies) was taken up by smart people within the councils, but they often failed to put a sound strategy behind the initiatives.

NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Stoner, presents the $10,000 prize for the Digital Sydney design competition to Ascender Design Creative Director, Adrian Weller

The NSW government is keen to promote Sydney as an Asia-Pacific digital hub.

The government used CeBIT to launch the initiative — a showreel will showcase NSW digital strengths during CeBIT Australia, the Vivid Festival and globally.

Opposition leader Barry O’Farrell last week pledged $2 million to set up a Telehealth Technology Centre at Penrith.

Staff at the centre, which would be based at Nepean Hospital, would work with acute, primary and community care clinicians, universities, the Federal Government and the non-government sector to explore opportunities which provide care closer to home.

The Northern Star last night reported the Northern NSW Local Health District Board had, on the advice of Mr Crawford, voted to dump a controversial telehealth trial for Mullumbimby that would have meant dropping the hospital's overnight doctor position.

In the far north of the New South Wales coast, just shy of the Queensland border, lies Tweed Shire.

Covering about a thousand square kilometres it's an area of outstanding natural beauty and an appealing sub-tropical climate.

The controversial scheme would see late-night patients assessed using a video link to the Tweed Heads Hospital.

But the chief executive of the local health network, Chris Crawford, says equipment is still being installed and he's yet to make a final decision.

Transformative program to position region for post-COVID-19 economic and employment recovery

The University of Wollongong (UOW) has warmly welcomed the launch of the Illawarra-Shoalhaven City Deal prospectus for providing a vision and program to drive the transformation of the region and its economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The newly revised guide provides simplified guidance on a range of related implementation, technical and usage issues.

"The previous Labor government adopted a piecemeal approach to ICT that saw at least $1.44 billion of taxpayers' money wasted in cost blowouts on projects like HealthSMART, Myki and the LEAP database," Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips said.

GPs and other health specialists in the region are set to start conducting follow-up consultations with patients remotely, as part of the Western Local Health District's plan to localise health services and to decrease patients' need to travel over the next three years.

"We know that the impact on patients and their families is really significant when they have to travel away from their home town," Western Local Health District Chief Executive Scott McLachlan said.

At least three months after it was scheduled to allocate the next round of funding for the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) project, the Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) has confirmed a figure has been finalised.

A spokesperson for DoHA told Computerworld Australia it had finalised the funding with the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), originally scheduled to be allocated last November, for the “final scope” of activities to 30 June 2012.

National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) has received an extra $42 million in 2015-2016 from the Rudd Government to help support the digital economy.

This brings the total Rudd Government investment in NICTA to $130 million during the next three years. The funding is already included in the Budget.

“I am delighted to reaffirm the ACT Government’s long-term commitment to NICTA. As the largest ICT research and development organisation in Australia, NICTA is a vital and inspiring part of Canberra’s economic landscape,” the Chief Minister said.

The $12 million, three-year research project aims to advance fundamental mathematics and statistics to provide a framework, methodologies and tools for data-enabled scientific insight and discovery.

Speaking at the official launch of the knowledge discovery project at the Sydney headquarters of SIRCA - the body set up by Australian and New Zealand universities to provide global data and advanced tools to promote and enable financial research and innovation - NICTA CEO, Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte, said the initiative was supported by $4 million from the Science and Industry Endowment Fund (SIEF) and $8 million from the research collaborators over the life of the three-year project.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners yesterday called for new Medicare rebates in recognition of the extra workload GPs will undertake in consultations to initiate and update patients' shared health summaries and other elements of the Gillard government’s $500 million personally controlled e-health record system.

"The RACGP is concerned that the current plan does not offer any incentives for general practice to create and maintain documents for indexing in the PCEHR, such as shared health summaries," RACGP president Claire Jackson said in a statement on Wednesday.

Since the PCEHR Bills were passed in the lower house in late February, consumer advocates have turned to a joint parliamentary inquiry into Cyber-Safety for Seniors as a venue for unresolved concerns over the program.

Last week, Health's chief information officer, Paul Madden, conceded the PCEHR system will be vulnerable to attack from fraudsters at the user's end.