Health and Media

The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, chaired by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), advanced bills to the full committee that improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure and strengthen public safety communications.

More than half of US households — 53.9% — rely entirely on cellphones, according to a survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2006, only 15.8% of survey respondents said they didn’t have a landline telephone. The iPhone and its Android counterparts launched the next year, and the rate of landline abandonment has since steadily climbed. “There are countries in Europe where 80 to 90% of households are wireless only, so this trend could continue for some time,” said Stephen J.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he has circulated a draft order to his colleagues that would take immediate action to significantly increase funding for the Universal Service Fund’s Rural Health Care Program. The program’s current annual funding cap is $400 million. The cap was set in 1997 and was never indexed for inflation. Recently, demand for funding under the program has outpaced the budget, creating uncertainty for patients, health care providers, and communications companies alike.

More and more, rural hospitals and clinics rely on high-speed internet access to bridge the urban-rural gap and provide their patients with services that are often found only in much larger cities. But a federal program to help subsidize the cost of broadband for rural health care facilities has hit its funding cap, which may jeopardize the push to connect more rural health facilities. 

[Commentary] Telemedicine — the delivery of health care services using communications technology — can be a critical tool for making Americans healthier. A concerted push to seize the untapped potential of telemedicine could help us tackle today’s health challenges. The most crucial step in seizing the opportunities of digital medicine is making sure that every community has high-speed Internet access.

A bipartisan group of thirty-one Senators sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission calling for greater funding for the Rural Health Care (RHC) program.

Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn. These methods are so effective they can activate similar mechanisms as cocaine in the brain, create psychological cravings and even invoke “phantom calls and notifications” where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn’t really there.

Facebook was in discussions with major medical institutions about sharing user and patient data for a research project.

The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA),  announces its Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) Grant Program application window for Fiscal Year (FY) 2018.

[Op-ed] National debates too often miss the reality on the ground in Alaska, and that reality is at the forefront of my mind when I’m considering the current debate about Net Neutrality. I strongly support a free and open internet and agree with those concerned about internet service providers prioritizing one website’s traffic over another’s or throttling access to certain content. I also believe and prefer Congress, not an executive agency like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), should legislate protections for the internet.