FCC broadband plan targets e-health expansion
By Brian Robinson
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Federal Communications Commission formally adopted and forwarded to Congress a plan to significantly upgrade U.S. broadband connections that could greatly boost the adoption rate of health IT.
The National Broadband Plan was mandated by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, and is the result of an unprecedented level of public workshops, hearings and online interaction. The process to get to the plan generated some 75,000 pages of public comment.
The health care chapter of the plan (http://www.broadband.gov/plan/10-healthcare/) includes substantial changes to the FCC’s existing Rural Health Care Program, which already funds some broadband improvements. It has authorized funding of $400 million a year, but only a fraction of that is actually used.
It also recommends added funding of $29 million a year to help upgrade Indian Health Services’ broadband networks.
Crucially, the FCC plan expressly supports changes to reimbursement methods so that health care providers will be assured of getting paid for conducting electronic health services. That’s something that doctors and physicians have consistently said is needed to help the adoption of health IT.
And the FCC is recommending to Congress that current licensing, privileging and credentialing standards that now hamper physicians from practicing medicine remotely and across state lines be rewritten to better reflect the potential of 21st Century technologies.
The FCC’s health care recommendations are collected under four titles:
-- Create appropriate incentives for e-care utilization;
-- Modernize regulation to enable health IT adoption;
-- Unlock the value of data (which includes interoperability standards and patient access to electronic health care data);
-- Ensure sufficient connectivity for health care delivery locations.
Initial reactions to the plan were largely favorable, but this is just the start of the process, and whether or not it can be implemented in a timely manner will become clearer over the next few months.
About half of the plan’s overall recommendations can be accomplished by the FCC itself, which expects to begin formal comment proceedings soon. The other half will depend on the reactions of Congress and state and local governments, and much of that will come down to the costs involved.
The FCC said the plan overall is cost neutral, taking into account the billions of dollars it expects to get from the auction of some 500 MHz of spectrum it will provide to meet demands for the extra broadband connections.
