Telehealth

Connected Nation Michigan found that while each community may face its own unique challenges to providing telehealth services, many trends and correlations may be found: 

Community anchor institutions should be at the center of any comprehensive national strategy to promote the availability and use of High-Performance Broadband. Community anchor institutions use broadband to provide essential services to their community, such as education, information access, and telehealth services. But in the 21st century, community anchors’ missions are moving beyond their walls. Libraries no longer deliver knowledge that is housed only within their buildings or the covers of hardbound books.

The Department of Health and Human Services is offering grants to rural healthcare providers looking to use telehealth to improve emergency services, such as stroke, behavioral health or EMS care.

The weekend of Feb 21, Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks visited Puerto Rico, where he convened a field hearing on communications resiliency and visited mountain areas to learn about the challenges of deploying resilient infrastructure in Puerto Rico’s rural areas.  

One theme I keep hearing at the National Rural Health Association's 2020 summit is “rural America is having a moment; let’s make it a movement.” And there’s certainly a new movement in telehealth that we should tap into.  Given the significant cost savings and improved patient outcomes associated with connected care, we should align public policy in support of this movement in telehealth.

For pregnant women in rural areas, local resources supporting maternal health may be strained, and the nearest hospital is often far away, putting mothers and their babies at serious risk. That’s why I was proud to join my colleagues, Sens Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Todd Young (R-IN), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) to introduce the bipartisan Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act. This legislation would require the Federal Communications Commission to use data mapping to identify areas in the US that have both internet access gaps as well as high rates of poor maternal outcomes.

The Internet has become an indispensable platform for innovation, job creation, and free expression. It is critical to our quality of life and our global competitiveness. To take advantage of the major innovations that will be introduced in the coming years, Americans will need to be connected. And that, of course, only serves to underscore why the Federal Communications Commission’s top priority must be to expand the deployment of high-speed broadband networks to all American. I’m pleased to report that our strategy of encouraging investment and innovation is working.

What happens when a prime time TV show becomes a potential healthcare policy direction, plus a side helping of broadband adoption strategy? An episode of the NBC TV medical melodrama New Amsterdam inspired a five-city telehealth pilot project involving barbershops and hair salons. The show’s medical director had a brilliant idea to enlist barbershops in African-American neighborhoods to screen customers for hypertension (high blood pressure), which leads to an overwhelming majority of the 140,000 stroke-related deaths a year.

In the urban rental sector, where landlords around the country are trying to accommodate their residents’ needs with bike repair facilities and produce banks, one Philadelphia (PA) property developer is testing out telehealth.“The concept of landlords providing wraparound services for tenants, in particular, low-income tenants, is a no-brainer,” said Brian Murray, CEO of Shift Capital.

In urban neighborhoods, where Internet service and health care can be hard to access, a novel pilot project uses local barbershops and salons as wireless hubs and hypertension screening centers.