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If asked to name an initiative funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that will make a difference to health care in the United States, chances are the EHR adoption incentives would probably be the first to spring to mind. There is, though, a less obvious but potentially important answer: the broadband initiatives.

These initiatives, like the EHR incentives, are similarly aimed to use technology to provide public benefit; their goal to “accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas” will have a positive impact on a wide range of businesses and individuals alike. Health care providers and patients in particular will be poised to reap great benefits from improving the technology infrastructure. It will mean that practices will have a wider choice of electronic health record systems and can consider Application Service Provider (ASP) solutions that require Internet connectivity (a particular boon for smaller practices who struggle to afford the large upfront costs for a client-server-based system) and it will also have an impact on telemedicine, which has been growing in popularity over the last few years.

Telemedicine is particularly valuable for rural areas where there is a low density population spread over hundreds of miles; traditionally, such communities are difficult to serve effectively. As well as two-way video conferencing, telemedicine also includes remote monitoring and could even extend to surgeons performing operations from miles away using remote-controlled robots. These technologies can increase patient access to care in a variety of situations. On top of benefitting rural communities, they could allow patients to be monitored after they return home from surgery or allow specialists to offer services to a much wider geographic area. However, current barriers to adoption not only include lack of access to a high-speed Internet connection, but also the lack of payer consistency in reimbursement for these services. Currently, Medicaid covers certain telemedicine services in just 27 states, and private payers up until now have also had a spotty reimbursement record. Other potential issues include state-based licensure limits, an absence of clearly defined privacy standards relating to telemedicine as well as concerns about how it might increase liability suits. Nevertheless, access to broadband across the United States is a positive step toward harnessing available technology that could improve patient outcomes in a way that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

You can read more about the broadband initiatives and access materials relating to its impact on health care here.