FCC, Industry Offer Solutions to Improve Telemedicine Through Spectrum, Infrastructure
More than ten million Americans benefited from telemedicine last year, said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at a Friday conference hosted by the American Telemedicine Association. CTIA and Time Warner Cable held a panel discussion on how wireless and wireline technologies are helping to advance telemedicine platforms to rural and urban areas.
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The FCC’s Healthcare Connect Fund will provide funding to eligible healthcare providers that will cover 65 percent of cost of broadband services or healthcare provider-owned networks, said Rosenworcel. The FCC opened up the 2360-2400 MHz band for medical body area networks (MBAN) last year. “It sounds like science fiction, but by using small low powered sensors on the body, we can capture a wide range of physiological damage that can be sent along wirelessly to help healthcare providers,” said Rosenworcel. “It reduces the cost of patient monitoring and it makes it possible for more accurate, more patient-centered and more preventative care.” Rosenworcel wants the FCC to work with other federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, to make effective policy changes. “Digitization, cloud computing, broadband ubiquity, and new wireless services are combining in such a potent way,” she said. “We can seize this mix and make telemedicine an integral part of modern medicine and in the process we can save lives, enhance patient care, improve outcomes and lower costs."
Access to spectrum and better infrastructure to support spectrum are the critical needs for the wireless industry, said CTIA Vice President Jot Carpenter. “We need to adapt our structure for what our network is capable to do,” said Carpenter. Healthcare providers have a common goal to figure out business and maximize common care opportunities, he said. “In this business, everyone wants to have access to five bars of connectivity, but no one wants to build a tower.” Carpenter said product lifecycles are short, so it becomes difficult to go through the multiyear approval process put in place by the FCC. “This tension between government and industry needs to be resolved,” he said.
Time Warner Cable sees helping healthcare providers as a huge opportunity because the healthcare industry accounts for 17 percent of the gross domestic product, said Vice President Satyanarayana Parimi. The wireline industry is also focused on providing infrastructure with wireless as a backup. TWC’s initial focus is providing telemedicine in the home videoconferencing and remote monitoring arena using medical devices. “We want to have virtual visits and we are looking into technologies through the TV rather than the computer, since many of these people do not know how to use a computer,” Parimi said. TWC wants to offer healthcare providers their telemedicine technologies to be included in their healthcare plans. “With the cost of healthcare in the United States predicted to be nearly three trillion [dollars] this year, we should see solutions that will reduce cost while also improving medical outcomes and patient care,” said Rosenworcel.