Federal Communications Commission Adopts Further Improvements to Rural Health Care Program

The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules making multiple improvements to the Rural Health Care (RHC) Program, which helps rural health care providers afford the broadband connectivity needed for telehealth and telemedicine services. This action will improve program administration and increase participation by allowing health care providers that expect to become eligible in the near future to request funding sooner, aligning program deadlines, simplifying rules for calculating urban rates, streamlining administrative processes, and freeing up unused funding for other purposes. The RHC Program provides vital support to assist rural health care providers with the costs of broadband and other eligible services. Specifically, this Report and Order will permit conditional approval of eligibility for health care providers that expect to be eligible in the near future to allow them to initiate competitive bidding and request funding; align the Service Provider Identification Number change deadline with the invoice deadline; simplify the rules for calculating urban rates for the Telecommunications Program by eliminating the seldom-used “standard urban distance” component of the rule that determines urban rates; and allow health care providers to request updates to time periods covered by a competitive bidding exemption to reflect the actual start and end dates of multi-year contracts.