Viewpoints
Fiber broadband will help us stay healthy, thanks to healthcare advances. And when we need help at home, fiber will be there to help our helpers.
By: Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)
High-speed, low-latency broadband that fiber delivers is providing a greenfield for innovation in the healthcare sector and in ways few of us could imagine. One of the people with a bright vision of the future is Dr. Ivar Mendez, Director of the Virtual Health Hub in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who spoke at FBA’s Toronto Regional Fiber Connect Workshop in August.
Access to timely and appropriate healthcare services in the province of Saskatchewan is a significant challenge for residents who live outside of city centers, with one-third of the province’s population living in rural areas. Those residents face limited services and staff shortages that their urban-dwelling neighbors don’t have, resulting in longer wait times, delayed treatments, and the need for long-distance travel to reach appointments, especially for specialized treatment. On top of that, indigenous populations have additional challenges in accessing culturally sensitive care.
The Virtual Health Hub (VHH) is designed to bridge those issues by providing healthcare services remotely using the latest in technology delivered from a purpose-built facility built at the Whitecap Dakota Nation in Saskatchewan.
Teaming up with local community healthcare providers and using advance remote presence technologies – plural – the Hub provides a variety of services so patients can receive timely and high-quality care closer to their home, saving them from hours of travel to a major city.
In addition to technology, VHH has partnered with the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies (SIIT) to deliver a Virtual Care Assistant certificate program. Graduates are equipped with the necessary skills to support clinicians remotely delivering virtual healthcare services. Consider it a step up from a generalized digital navigator, one specifically targeted to the unique needs of the medical professional working in a clinical setting.
Among the technologies VHH is leveraging are AI, point of care analyzers, image diagnostic systems (such as robotic ultrasonography), wearable telepresence devices, and remote patient monitoring sensors, all enabled by robust, high-speed, low-latency fiber provisioned, delivered, and operated by incumbent SaskTel, an early leader Canada’s fiber industry.
Canada has a gap of about 70,000 healthcare workers nationwide, Mendez says. Using the latest healthcare technologies, the Virtual Health Hub is reducing unnecessary child transports, saving money through reduced need for CT scans, providing prenatal and diagnostic imaging to patients more directly without multi-hour transports, and helping to build point-of-care systems in the community. By applying innovation through a hybrid approach combining advanced technology, remote specialists, and on-site aides and technicians, healthcare can be delivered faster and at a lower cost outside of traditional urban centers.
Mendez says $106 million (CAN) is spent annually just on patient transport for a specific group of 2,000 indigenous individuals in the Saskatchewan province. The money, not spent on care, is a significant cost.
Use of robotic technology and telehealth consults has resulted in a 63% reduction in transportation of pediatric patients without compromising the quality of care, with the savings in reduced transportation providing roughly four to five times return on investment compared to the cost of the robotic tools used for remote diagnostics.
Fiber’s 3 paths to better healthcare
The VHH model is part of a much broader canvas with fiber providing new and innovative services for healthcare providers and their patients. As a result, providers deliver improved quality of care, better outcomes, and lower costs. Fiber provides secure, resilient, and low-latency broadband for individual in-home care, assisting visiting caregivers, and supporting local medical care at clinics and hospitals. Each of those areas works the best and most efficiently with high-speed broadband and new applications are emerging every year to leverage existing consumer and medical devices and add new solutions to the lineup.
Most of us are familiar with a traditional telehealth visit, having had at least one or two during the pandemic. A healthcare professional and the patient discuss issues over a video call, with the professional conducting an initial assessment and deciding if a real-world trip is necessary or if the problem can be resolved through medication and other treatments.
Enhanced healthcare practices are leveraging a variety of technologies unavailable 20 years ago, including wearables, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) systems. Today, approved and consumer off-the-shelf devices are providing essential monitoring of short-term and chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and high blood pressure outside of normal office visits, leading to improved patient engagement and outcomes while delivering lower costs for healthcare providers, saving money for individuals, insurance companies, employers, and the government.
Cell phone cameras linked to reliable and resilient Wi-Fi and fiber in the home will be used in the near future to literally take a snapshot of vital signs for remote patients, capturing heart and respiratory rates, blood pressure, and other metrics through video observation, providing remote caregivers with more detailed information on the patient.
Next-generation telehealth visits using AR/VR applications will deliver at home vision testing and more convenient delivery of mental and physical therapy outside of specialized settings, further saving time and money for all involved. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has deployed at least 3,500 AR/VR headsets across more than 170 clinical sites to teach and develop mindfulness and wellness practices, with veterans having the opportunity to continue VR exercises at home using their own equipment.
Fiber broadband is helping and will continue to help us stay healthy and assist us in maintaining better quality of life as we age.
With the global longevity market at an estimated $45 trillion dollars, AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative is fostering startup companies building next-generation solutions to keep people living independently and in good health as long as they can, with solutions ranging from personalized dementia care to AI wellness coaches, including solutions like an integrated sleep system that provides health monitoring, ambient vital sign monitoring via radar technology, and a smart toilet to measure heart rate and blood oxygen levels.
And when we need help at home, fiber will be there to help our helpers.
The U.S. home healthcare services market is projected to grow from $107 billion in 2025 to $176 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that employment of home health and personal care aides is also projected to grow 17 percent between 2024 and 2044.
Home healthcare professionals use broadband today to pull up existing electronic medical record (EMR) information and provide the means for updating records of patient status from in the home, along with the types of treatment and care provided during visits. AR/VR technology will provide “over the shoulder” assistance and guidance for visiting healthcare workers, enabling them to consult with and provide real-time testing and treatment working with remote specialists, and providing them easy access to multimedia reference materials.
Supporting local rural medical care
Fiber broadband already plays a crucial role in delivering specialized care to rural America across the country. Fiber Forward, the publication of the Fiber Broadband Association, has documented how organizations such as UVA Health and OU Health University of Oklahoma Medical Center are using telemedicine to reduce patient travel and provide time-critical care in fields such as neonatal support and stroke intervention.
For example, OU Health provides rural hospitals in the state with on-call remote neurologists to evaluate patients and provide an appropriate treatment to the on-site emergency room team, including the approval for clot-busting drugs.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of high-speed, low-latency broadband for rural health care, especially with the cost and size of diagnostic scans and tools steadily decreasing.
Quality specialized care can be delivered rapidly at the first contact between the patient and local health care facility, resulting in better outcomes that save time, money, and lives. Fiber is the only medium that provides high-speed, secure connectivity to meet the needs of the healthcare community for both todays and tomorrow’s solutions.
