July 2013

All of a sudden, two of the top four U.S. carriers have a new smartphone upgrade plan with another one expected to join suit. Does the wireless industry really feel bad for those who want to trade up but can’t or is something else in the works?

The new early upgrade plans may seem altruistic on the surface but they’re not all good deals. And they coincide with an interesting data point: Smartphone upgrade figures are down, down, down. Simply put: Fewer people are upgrading because the changes in yearly smartphone models are more incremental than ever and because most consumers are locked into two-year contracts with their current devices. For some, it just makes no sense to invest more money in a new phone when the current one works fine and can still run all of the latest and greatest apps. The carriers don’t have much to do with the first point, but they have everything to do with the second. Why would carriers care if consumers don’t upgrade their smartphones as often? I can think of at least two reasons: One financial and one technological.

The American Cable Association and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association are on the same page in regards to the Federal Communications Commission giving smaller operators some flexibility when it comes to requiring digital navigation devices to be usable by the blind or visually impaired. That came in comments on FCC implementation of the Twenty First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) and its May Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on how the accessibility mandate should be applied to on-screen navigation devices.

ACA is not trying to get out of the requirement, but instead to provide those services "in the most cost-efficient manner," the group says. ACA represents small and mid-sized operators. ACA wants the FCC to allow systems with 20,000 or fewer subs -- some ACA members have only a few hundred -- the flexibility in cost and time frames to make the mandates achievable and reasonable. NCTA agreed that smaller operators need help.

The last time the Federal Communications Commission put a serious chunk of mobile frequencies on the auction block, George Bush was still President.

After a five-year hiatus, the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to put a significant chunk of mobile airwaves up for sale. It’s targeting January for the opening bids on newly minted 1900 MHz PCS airwaves, the same spectrum most of our mobile voice and 3G data networks use today. The spectrum in question, called the PCS H-block, is really a tiny hunk of spectrum: just 10 MHz nationwide divided into 176 discrete geographical licenses. Only a single operator could use these frequencies in any given city to add capacity to an LTE or 3G network.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released new data that demonstrate that doctors and hospitals are using electronic health records (EHRs) to provide more information securely to patients and are using that information to help manage their patients’ care.

Doctors, hospitals, and other eligible health care providers that have adopted or meaningfully used certified EHRs can receive incentive payments through the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs. Already, approximately 80 percent of eligible hospitals and more than 50 percent of eligible professionals have adopted EHRs and received incentive payments from Medicare or Medicaid. By meaningfully using EHRs, doctors and other health care providers prove they have been able to increase efficiency while safeguarding privacy and improving care for millions of patients nationwide.

Since the EHR Incentive Programs began in 2011:

• More than 190 million electronic prescriptions have been sent by doctors, physician’s assistants and other health care providers using EHRs, reducing the chances of medication errors.
• Health care professionals sent 4.6 million patients an electronic copy of their health information from their EHRs.
• More than 13 million reminders about appointments, required tests, or check-ups were sent to patients using EHRs.
• Providers have checked drug and medication interactions to ensure patient safety more than 40 million times through the use of EHRs.
• Providers shared more than 4.3 million care summaries with other providers when patients moved between care settings resulting in better outcomes for their patients.