July 2016

On August 2, 2016, the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect2Health Task Force (C2H) will unveil a new mapping tool in support of its efforts to further chart the broadband future of healthcare. The Mapping Broadband Health in America tool enables more efficient, data-driven decision making at the intersection of broadband and health and promotes stakeholder collaboration. By allowing users to ask and answer questions about broadband and health at the county and census block levels, the tool provides valuable data and insights to drive broadband health policies and connected health solutions for this critical space. Recognizing that technology innovations in clinical practice and care delivery are fundamentally changing the face of health care, C2H has been exploring and analyzing the intersection of broadband, advanced technology, and health.

This mapping tool builds on the group’s work and reflects the overarching vision of the Task Force for leveraging broadband in health: “Everyone connected to the people, services, and information they need to get well and stay healthy.”

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked the first anniversary of its ConnectHome pilot program—which connects public housing residents with low-cost broadband, devices, digital literacy training, and technical assistance—with a large-scale expansion that HUD Secretary Julián Castro called ConnectHome Nation.

Public housing and HUD-assisted residents living in Comcast’s service area are now eligible to apply for Internet Essentials, the company’s high-speed internet adoption program for low-income families. Up to 2 million HUD-assisted homes will have access to the program. The public–private partnership brings together Internet service providers, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector to narrow the digital divide for families with school-aged children who live in HUD-assisted housing. It builds on the ConnectED initiative to connect 99% of K–12 students to high-speed internet in classrooms and libraries by 2018. In a July 14 media call, Castro recognized the national partnership of the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries in the 28 pilot communities for helping to create true educational experiences for families. Libraries from Meriden (CT) to Nashville (TN) and Cleveland (OH) to Seattle (WA) are working with local public housing authorities to provide training to youth and their families

Add the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to those asking the Federal Communications Commission to revise or reboot its marketplace anaylsis of the business data service (BDS), formerly special access, market. In a letter to the FCC this week, Steven King, executive director of the commission, cited new data from cable operators that it says showed they significantly undercounted the number of locations "capable of" providing BDS services. The cable operators initially had provided data on where they were actively providing competitive BDS service but did not include places where they could provide it, but weren’t.

William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on July 20 in Munster (IN) He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said.

Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals — including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. “The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing,” he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, “for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses’ aides.” He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self-dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series “a model of municipal reporting.”