Communications Technology and Health Care

Over a century ago, Alexander Graham Bell met with the President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, to demonstrate a new invention: the telephone. After Bell finished his demonstration, the President turned to him and said, "That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?" As it turned out, the answer to the President's question was simple: doctors.

We're a long way from ubiquitous telemedicine today. When developing the National Broadband Plan, we realized that to maximize broadband availability and use, the United States not only needs bigger and faster networks, but it also needs innovation and investment throughout what we called the "broadband ecosystem" - the networks, the applications, and the devices that affect what Americans can do with broadband. More capable networks enable medical facilities to employ devices that run applications like electronic health records and image transfer applications. And more advanced applications can often mean saving more lives. But today, America has gaps in all three parts of the broadband ecosystem that are slowing progress through this "virtuous circle" of innovation, and preventing telemedicine from being adopted more widely. Connectivity via robust networks is a baseline requirement for telemedicine. But 3,600 small providers in the United States lack the connectivity they need to adopt even basic health IT, let alone high-definition video consultation. For example, nearly 30 percent of federally-funded Rural Health Clinics and a third of Indian Health Service locations do not have basic broadband connectivity. Furthermore, although Americans send over 4 billion text messages on a typical day, our 9-1-1 system still lacks the network deployment and equipment to support the transmission of text and images to emergency response centers.