Viewpoints
Fiber is and will continue to be the necessary and essential tool for healthcare across the nation, regardless of location.
By: Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association (FBA)
Telehealth was transformative and lifesaving during the pandemic. The benefits telehealth practices bring to providers and patients by leveraging reliable, secure, high-speed fiber broadband continue to accrue, but it is time to start investing for tomorrow as technologies such as AI, VR, robotics, and next-generation diagnostics are integrated into today’s health care systems.
Demand for telehealth services is strong across rural communities, where distance, provider shortages, and limited access to specialist care create barriers to early diagnosis and timely treatment. For the heartland of America, virtual care is the difference between receiving timely care and going without, with that difference sometimes a matter of serious injury or death.
Reliable, secure, high-capacity fiber broadband is the essential foundation for delivering high-quality, scalable telehealth services of today and tomorrow, ensuring patients can access care when and where they need it. As the health industry continues to seek more ways to deliver quality care with improved outcomes that improve quality of life while improving costs for both patients and insurers, fiber is the platform delivering those services.
There are approximately 5,650 Medicare-certified rural health clinics in the United States, according to the HRSA Data Warehouse, located across 47 states and serving over 60% of rural Americans. For rural hospitals and clinics, broadband is the essential link connecting immediate point-of-care services and facilities with urban-located expertise to assist in the evaluation and treatment of patients.
Driving growth
Telehealth provides a dynamic and growing toolbox of solutions for providers and patients, including virtual visits at a time and place of the patient’s choice, remote patient monitoring to reduce costs and physical footprint of care delivery, and digital diagnostics taking advantage of a mix of consumer and clinically certified devices. Clinicians can monitor chronic conditions, conduct behavioral health visits, and perform follow-up care with delaying treatment or requiring travel.
At the same time, consumers of health care have come to expect on-demand virtual-care options for a variety of services, including treatment of minor ailments that can be diagnosed in a video call and addressed with a prescription, and the growing use of on-demand services for elective care, such as weight management. Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) research shows that telehealth utilization continues to grow and remains well above pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating that virtual care is a lasting structural shift.
If you don’t believe me, believe Charles Barkley and Serena Williams, the spokespeople for Ro. The direct-to-patient healthcare company integrates telehealth, pharmacy, at-home testing, labs, and diagnostics to deliver care to every single county in the country, including 99% of primary care “deserts.” For people seeking solutions to issues not covered by insurance, Noom, Ro, and others are leveraging telemedicine as part of an integrated solution to provide affordable options deliverable at times and places of the consumer’s convenience, with providers enabled to deliver new and unique services for improving health and outcome outside of traditional practices.
But it isn’t just home and retail medicine seeing an expansion of service delivery. Hospitals and clinics are also reaping the benefits of telemedicine to provide a range of life-saving services to patients in rural locations where specialists are located hundreds of miles and hours away, from time-critical pediatric and stroke care across America to robotic ultrasound evaluations in Saskatchewan.
For example, Norton County Hospital in Kansas provides critical care to the community, with the next closest hospital over an hour away, with the closest neurologist more than three hours away. As a community anchor institution, the facility provides both inpatient and outpatient services, with telehealth services from a center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, providing immediate advanced support to emergency room staff while specialized outpatient services are delivered through a combination of monthly staff visits and telehealth follow-ups.
In the Great White North, the Virtual Health Hub (VHH) is increasing the availability of services to thirty of Saskatchewan’s northern and rural communities by leveraging the latest advances in virtual care, AI, and robotics systems. Robotic ultrasound enabled by fiber broadband is not science fiction, but a best care practice being delivered and expanded within the Canadian province that is saving expectant mothers days of travel and the associated expenses incurred.
The pioneering work at the VHH will be scalable to both rural and urban communities across Canada and equally applicable to towns and municipalities in the United States who have need of such services. VHH is one harbinger of the growth in the diversity and sophistication of telemedicine services from simple virtual consultative services between remote specialists and on-site care givers to more specialized care delivery leveraging robotics and next generation clinical devices that are more affordable and easier to use.
We’ve already seen one wave of improvement in healthcare imaging over the past decade, where CT and MRIs have moved out of large city hospital complexes and to more rural settings. For example, a full-body MRI scan can cost $2,500.
Advances in software, technologies, and design are driving next-generation imaging that will be both more accessible and more affordable, with one startup in the field predicting they can deliver a localized diagnostic MRI in an office setting for $100 to $200 per scan. Lower-cost imaging scans will move their use into regular practice rather than a special event, making them a standard diagnostic and health monitoring tool, like blood tests are today, in such areas as cancer and cardiovascular screening. People will be able to be treated earlier, resulting in better outcomes.
Continued innovation needs continued bandwidth growth
The Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 National Broadband Plan set a goal of at least 1 Gbps for anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings. With the continued growth of healthcare broadband usage through virtual visits between patients and caregivers, virtual support in clinical settings at point-of-care, the proliferation of imaging from city centers to offices and rural areas, and the widespread use of electronic medical records, it is time to consider a new goal.
AI, continued growth of virtual support between rural point-of-care and urban centers, robotics, remote home health care devices, and the next generation of imaging scanners will continue to drive the use of broadband at hospitals large and small, so we should start preparing for the future today, especially in rural areas where the need for more affordable middle-mile continues to grow. There’s no future where broadband needs decrease, especially as AI becomes a tool to increase productivity for health care workers of all stripes while taking care of mundane tasks.
For example, digital transcription is increasingly common in documenting patient-caregiver interactions, enabling the caregiver to focus on the patient while providing an easily reviewable record of diagnosis and recommended course of treatment. Turning to back-office work, Utah has launched a 12-month pilot program to allow an AI agent to autonomously renew prescriptions for a number of chronic conditions, making life easier for people with chronic conditions and their primary care physicians.
Another consideration for the medical sector is how breakthroughs in quantum computing and sensing will impact broadband and the use of fiber. Quantum computing is already being used to model chemical reactions for pharmaceutical research and development and will be applied to areas such as faster image processing and interpretation and optimized treatment plans based on individual genetic profiles to increase the effectiveness while minimizing side effects. Meanwhile, quantum-key distribution (QKD) will provide next-generation communications security to ensure your medical records stay safe.
For all these reasons, fiber is and will continue to be the necessary and essential tool for healthcare across the nation, regardless of location. Communities large and small need to continue to understand the importance of fiber for providing enhanced quality care regardless of your zip code or population density, with that includes unlocking new solutions for decades to come.
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