Broadband: Bring it on!

Telehealth, this month’s cover story topic, has taken the national policy spotlight recently thanks to provisions of the National Healthcare Reform legislation and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In most areas, broadband service is the catalyst for fast, high-capacity information delivery—telehealth’s lifeblood.

ARRA charged the FCC with developing a nationwide plan for broadband deployment and use. The FCC announced that plan earlier this spring. But if more than 60 percent of the country already has gained access, connected without a federal call for deployment, why should the government build out broadband?

For economic reasons: Carriers don’t offer broadband where it’s not worth their while, so the parts of the country that are sparsely populated and/or poor have been largely passed by. Yet, these areas suffer from entrenched health problems, are often underserved by healthcare providers and therefore have the most to gain from telehealth.

The FCC’s broadband initiative could help put healthcare in underserved areas on a more equal technological footing with urban centers by building the pipes that enable rural and underserved hospitals to share information with patients, other providers and facilities, and payers. Currently, “3,600 small healthcare facilities lack the necessary mass market infrastructures to enable them to use health records in meaningful way,” says Mohit Kaushal, MD, the FCC’s digital healthcare director. In addition, one in three Indian Health Service sites are not reached by mass-market broadband. “But we do know that 92 percent of IHS sites buy a Dedicated Internet Access Connection of 1.5 megabits per second, which is more expensive than mass-market packages. They can’t use EHRs in a meaningful way because of costs,” Kaushal says.

If current trends continue, medical images and video will be the largest files traversing the internet in two years. Getting images to providers faster will expedite care. New applications are arriving every day, says  Kaushal. “There’s a set of broadband-enabled health IT technologies now, but also on the horizon that can help mitigate many issues.”

Although broadband-enabled health IT solutions have great potential to improve patient care and provider communication, “broadband is not a panacea,” states the FCC Broadband Plan. “However, there is a developing set of broadband-enabled solutions that can play an important role in the transformation required to address these issues.” It’s time to get those solutions to where they’re needed most.