From tomorrow an internet consultation with a doctor will become an official item that can be claimed under Medicare.

It is likely to be the first tangible sign for many Australians of the possibilities offered by the National Broadband Network.

Julia Gillard was displaying her bedside manner in Darwin yesterday to promote telemedicine - one of the big tangible benefits of the National Broadband Network.

Her Health Minister Nicola Roxon was at the other end of a high speed broadband connection in Adelaide, alongside a specialist who was diagnosing an elderly woman with a nasty lesion on her leg.

However, this was more than an event for the cameras.

From tomorrow, online consultations over the internet will be funded by Medicare as part of the Government's $620 million tele-health initiative - a move that has the potential to make life easier for both doctors and patients, particularly those who live in the bush.

"I think the change is probably going to be an incremental one but, over time as we understand the utility of tele-health and how it fits into practice, it will make some substantial differences, particularly for patients and consumers in rural and remote locations, where they suffer the tyranny of distance," said Dr Nathan Pinskier, a Melbourne GP and the e-health spokesman for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.

It is a slow transition for now, but he says the landscape will change significantly when the National Broadband Network becomes a reality.

"The NBN should provide us high availability, high speed connections which will allow us to conduct both video consultations, look at images such as radiology images and also, with high definition cameras, be able to see high definition images the same as watching a high definition television," Dr Pinskier added.

"So, particularly for dermatological conditions or conditions where the specialist needs to have a very close look at the patient, the NBN will provide that utility."

Dr Pinskier says there will still be some limitations to diagnoses over the internet, but they will be reduced by being able to use high definition video.

"We'll be able to certainly see things very clearly and, again, colour across the internet may not be the same as looking at someone face to face, so yellow for a patient that might be jaundice might not appear the same on one screen as another," he said.

"The last thing you want to do is make the wrong diagnosis based on an image that is not actually reflective of what happens, you know, of the real world scenario."

The Government expects the Medicare rebate for tele-medicine will initially cover 62 per cent of Australians.

However, some areas are ahead of their time and are already using the internet for online consultations, such as the Grampians Rural Health Alliance in western Victoria.

Its chief information officer David Ryan says both doctors and patients are looking forward to the rebate, and the eventual higher speeds from the NBN.

"What we're finding is general practitioners around the region have been struggling to be able to care for their patients locally," he explained.

"So what it means is that those patients can stay as local as possible, and it means they're not having to travel, but it also means that the care that they get is at the same level of that of a metropolitan centre."

He says doctors are starting to embrace the possibilities of the new technology.

"The rebates kick in from the first of July, so we've been talking to quite a few specialists and obviously once you've got the specialists on board, the GP will then take part in that service as well," he said.

David Ryan says there has been an enthusiastic embrace of the technology by patients.

"What we're finding is that patients are, in particular in our region, have been using video conferencing for a while, but they've been using it mainly in hospital facilities," he added.

"So they're actually looking forward to having these technologies placed inside a GP office, or inside a community facility, because that can then lead to them not having to travel as far.

"And it just means that they can stay much more local and, I guess ultimately when the NBN is in place, what it will allow is the ability hopefully for a patient to remain at home and to join into those video conferences and those consultations without actually leaving the confines of their own home."

It is still early days, and the NBN could remain a hot political issue for years, but the Government expects to see almost half a million tele-health consultations over the next four years.