Telehealth

This tech summit is focusing on an important topic: improving the lives of Mississippians through communications technologies. Already today, you’ve heard discussions about the next generation of wireless connectivity and the new applications and services that they’ll enable.

Access to health care is a critical problem in many rural areas of the United States. Few physicians choose to practice in rural counties, according to the National Rural Health Association, yet the rural population is, on average, older and more in need of medical care. Census Bureau data show that 18 percent of the rural population is age 65 or older, compared with 13 percent in urban areas. Rural clinics and hospitals are consolidating or closing, leaving people to drive long distances to see doctors. Policymakers are counting on telemedicine to fill in the gaps.

The International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and I teamed up to survey the association’s members.

We need to lift rural communities up as places of opportunity, both for this generation and future ones. That work begins by deploying investment and innovation to secure the health of all rural residents. Mayor Pete's rural health policies will:

The US ranks forty-sixth when it comes to pregnancy-related deaths and is the only industrialized country in the world with an increasing maternal mortality rate. Maternal mortality is a particularly striking issue in rural America.

The Federal Communications Commission reformed the Rural Health Care Program (RHC) aiming to ensure limited program funds are disbursed efficiently and equitably, promote transparency and predictability in the program’s administration, and strengthen safeguards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The action takes a number of steps to reform the distribution of RHC funding, in particular by revising the rules governing the Telecom Program to simplify calculation of the urban rate—the amount health care providers pay—and the rural rate—the amount that service providers receive.

Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR) and John Hoeven (R-ND) led a bipartisan coalition of senators urging the delay of the Federal Communications Commission’s order to reform the Rural Health Care (RHC) Program. In a letter addressed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the senators outlined their concerns with the FCC’s proposed RHC Program order by highlighting unaddressed obstacles that could effectively limit rural Americans’ access to high-quality health care by preventing health care providers from participating in the program.

The Federal Communications Commission held its monthly open meeting on July 10. We gave a preview of the meeting a few weeks back. There were eight items in total in the action-packed agenda, but we’re going to unpack a few of the actions that are especially relevant to open, affordable, high-capacity broadband in the U.S. 

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Aug 1, 2019:

Establishing the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund – The FCC will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would propose to adopt a two-phase reverse auction framework for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, committing $20.4 billion in high-cost universal service support to bring high-speed broadband service to millions of unserved Americans.