Slide 13 of 24
Notes:
The second environmental change factor in health care is high bandwidth networking.
Typical “bandwidth to the home” provided by cable and telephone companies today for $50/month is 400Kbps to 1.5Mbps, enough at the upper end for an uncompressed NTSC video channel or three compressed digital channels. Contrast this to modem speeds of 56Kbps maximum available a year or so ago, and the picture for personal bandwidth looks very promising. All types of services, including health care services such as in-home medical telemetry will be enabled by the availability of (but will have to compete for) this bandwidth.
A leading change-agent in high performance networking is the Next Generation Internet initiative, announced by the White House in 1996. The Federal NGI program includes the NSF, NASA, Department of Energy, the National Library of Medicine and Defense Department.
Objectives of the NGI initiative are…
