Telehealth

The Federal Communications Commission announced the launch of a major update to the Mapping Broadband Health in America platform, expanding its capacity to analyze the intersection of broadband connectivity and a range of critical health outcomes, including new variables to better examine maternal health.

On Monday, November 11th, to commemorate Veterans Day, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society released Veterans and Digital Equity: Planning for Success, a collaborative research effort with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Offices of Connected Care and Rural Engagement. We reviewed state digital equity plans to better understand what states' strategies are for connecting Veterans. My coauthors, Dr.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau establishes a uniform completion deadline of Dec. 31, 2025, for all participants in the Connected Care Pilot Program, and waives the previous completion deadline of three years from each project's start date.

Heartland Forward is launching an initiative to expand telehealth access in Arkansas and Oklahoma by teaching librarians how to prepare community members for a telehealth visit.

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that veterans across the country who are enrolled in VA care can now receive virtual emergency assessments to determine the severity of medical afflictions. The new tele-emergency care—or tele-EC—service is designed to connect retired servicemembers with clinical triage nurses, who can then evaluate their symptoms and determine if they require in-person aid. Veterans can access the tele-EC service by contacting VA Health Connect—which provides veterans 24/7 access to

The Indian telecommunication market witnessed a distortion in 2016 due to a late-entrant firm's disruptive market entry with deep-discounted pricing; however, Internet penetration marked a considerable increase. Using nationally representative cross-sectional data from the post-market disruption period and an instrumental variable strategy for identification, we estimate the impact of the Internet on the uptake of maternal and child healthcare services. We find that the Internet improves the uptake of antenatal care, institutional delivery, postnatal care, and modern contraceptive use.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the October Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, October 17, 2024:

On August 7, 2024, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the third funding report showing fiscal year (FY) 2022 data reported by 13 agencies across 70 programs making investments in broadband.

Adolescents and young adults are facing elevated rates of mental health issues—and they're also struggling with access to the mental health care they urgently need. When young people express the need for professional help, they often encounter obstacles to seeing a therapist, such as prolonged wait times, limited local access to mental health providers, or financial barriers. In light of these barriers, young people turn to social media and digital mental health apps to attempt to fulfill their needs.

The record shows that Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) recipients regard using access to broadband as critical to their healthcare. A recent study found that 75% of ACP participants fear that losing access to ACP will result in losing access to healthcare. This is consistent with another large-scale survey found that 45% of adults believe that inadequate access to technology, including broadband and computers, is a barrier to telehealth, and this was especially prominent among rural residents and adults over the age of 65. That is, ACP