Senate hearing extols benefits of telemedicine
On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing entitled Why Broadband Matters, with the goal of identifying the wide range of educational, economic, health care, and civic benefits of high speed Internet.
Among the witnesses was Jonathan Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association, who spoke about the importance of high speed Internet access for providing health care services to people in rural and remote parts of the country.
Linkous identified three stages in the development of telemedicine in the U.S. First, telemedicine allowed links between large hospitals and clinics in rural areas to help provide the most basic medical services. Second, links were created to people's homes -- typically with dial-up connections -- allowing very basic monitoring of vital signs like heart rate. This reaped major benefits in cost savings and early detection of health problems.
Now, telemedicine is entering the third stage, involving more advanced services like video conferencing between doctors and patients, transmission of large files like MRI results and tissue sample pictures, remote diagnoses, and preventive medicine programs.
As Linkous said,
"These are not novelty applications. They are an emerging part of health care delivery around the world and it is having a major impact on how our lives and how our children's lives are lived... This is telemedicine 3.0, and it's a reason we need to ensure all citizens of the US have access to broadband communications no matter where they live and no matter where they travel."
With these more advanced services, however, comes the need for more high speed connections, since many of them require transmission of large amounts of data. Expanding our high speed Internet infrastructure is an issue of giving all Americans, regardless of geography, access to the same kinds of essential health services:
"We can't use concrete or blacktop to build highways to everyone, but we can use telecommunications to open up their isolation and help them build a better life."
You can view Jonathan Linkous' full testimony here.
At the committee hearing, another witness further illustrated the many possibilities of telemedicine with a real-life example. Gene Peltola, President and CEO of Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation (YKHC), spoke to the committee via teleconference about his organization's successful efforts to bring health services to Eskimo residents of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a roadless region in Alaska the size of Oregon. (Read Peltola's full testimony here.)
With major weather and transportation problems in the Delta, YKHC has utilized a terrestrial microwave network -- made possible by funding from private industry and the Universal Service Fund's Rural Health Care program -- to deliver health care services to those who otherwise would have no access.
In particular, the program aids Alaska National Guard veterans of the Iraq war deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, using video-conferencing for psychiatrists and patients to interact. YKHC also provides tele-radiology services:
"Because of our inability to recruit a full-time radiologist to Bethel, we must rely on tele-radiology to meet our needs. We have two full-time radiologists, reading all images 24 hours a day 7 days a week from Dayton Ohio. Using our broadband network, we are able to send patient images directly to the radiologists' homes in Ohio. There, they read the exams in real time (there is no delay; they are waiting at their computers for the exams to come over the Internet) and send us their initial evaluation within 15 minutes from the time the patient was imaged in our x-ray departments."
Only with high speed Internet is it possible for specialists in Ohio to provide medical services to members of Eskimo tribes in the remotest parts of Alaska. If this technology can work there, just imagine the possibilities for everyone else.
Hearing: Why Broadband Matters (Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation)
American Telemedicine Association
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