The Oregon Health Network (pdf), one of the largest projects funded by the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, launched its network operations center today in Beaverton, Oregon.

OHN has a stated goal of bringing low-cost, high speed broadband to primary healthcare stakeholders in Oregon, potentially linking over 300 non-profit health care facilities, both urban and rural. Oregon Health Network seeks to be one tenant in infrastructure that also could be used for a wide variety of other governmental, educational or business applications (rfp).

The data capacity between each OHN user location and OHN exchange locations will be a minimum of 10 Megabits per second with an upgrade capacity in increments of 10 Megabits or 100 Megabits, up to 1 Gigabit, with future expansion to 10 Gigabits.

The Pilot Program will provide up to $20.2 million in funding for the project. The launch of the network operations center (NOC) will pull together multiple service providers into a single, consistent network to quickly resolve any network problems with a single call to the NOC.

“These critical improvements in the Oregon Health Network will further broadband’s role in delivering the best possible health care to Oregonians, no matter where they live,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (pdf).

The FCC established the $417 million Pilot Program to increase patient access to care via telemedicine and support the transfer of electronic medical records. Nationwide, 62 projects are eligible to receive Pilot Program funding for telehealth networks serving approximately 6,000 health care facilities in 42 states and three U.S. territories, using broadband technologys.

At this time, 41 of these projects have either received funding commitments or developed requests for proposals to select vendors to build out their broadband networks.