Craig Settles

How Telehealth and Telehealth Access Points Drive Broadband Adoption

What can make people enthusiastic about broadband? What if a community, using the creation orientation, views broadband as the means to build or invent things that didn’t exist before? Essential Families is a 501c3 nonprofit that provides virtual parental education and mental healthcare services. The organization conducted a telehealth pilot in one of the poorest communities in Kansas City (MO) with stellar results.

Chattanooga Invests in 1,000 Telehealth Accounts for Low-Income Residents, Social Determinants of Health

Too often policymakers, political leaders, contractors, and consultants want to tell communities just how broadband should work for their unserved and underserved.

Broadband is the Achilles' heel of telehealth

As wonderful as telehealth is, it has a serious Achilles' heel. The fate of telehealth adoption is tied to the fate of broadband adoption. And broadband in millions of additional homes isn't strong enough to drive telehealth. Redlining, politics, and adverse economics leaves low-income communities stuck with outdated, broken infrastructure. Annually, billions in government spending to replace obsolete networks passes over big cities and are squandered by large telecom and cable companies before broadband reaches rural homes.

You Can’t Spell ‘Broadband’ Without ‘Accountability’

The share of U.S. adults using the internet has not grown significantly since 2013, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s a trend reflected in rural broadband subscription rates that continue to lag significantly behind rates in urban areas. The gigabit elephant in the room is the ridiculous amount we spend for broadband relative to the quality of services communities, especially rural areas, get. Federal agencies have been spending $6 billion per year since 2009 for rural broadband.

The Key Ingredients of Modern Farming – Soil, Rain, and Broadband

The state of broadband in the US’s farmlands is a mixture of the good, the bad, and the apprehensive. The good: successes and advancements brought on by broadband and various digital technologies. The bad: many farms still have to rely on pitifully weak technologies such as satellite and DSL. The cloud of apprehension: we spend $6 billion in broadband grants yearly with surprisingly little to show for it, and yet we’re ready to do it again next year.

Libraries Could Be the New Clinics

In community broadband, libraries are considered “anchor institutions.” Like anchor tenants in a mall, libraries and other institutions, such as schools, hospitals and assisted living facilities, all contribute to the financial stability of broadband networks. Libraries drive large numbers of people onto networks. Now they can drive thousands to telehealth through those networks. Libraries are realizing that they can be in the vanguard of transforming health care delivery in urban and rural areas.

Broadband Anchor Institutions Drive Telehealth in Rural Areas

The FCC's Emergency Connectivity Fund is providing $7 billion worth of broadband and leading digital technology for two critical anchor institutions – libraries and schools. Three US Senators launched the BRIDGE Act to bring $40 billion to these and other anchor institutions. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) opened a $122 billion grab bag of tech and non-tech funds.

The ABCs of Telehealth in Schools

The Federal Communications Commission and the US Treasury Department are giving schools a tremendous opportunity to close both the homework gap and the healthcare gap.

Telehealth At the Library? You Bet!

Libraries may be on the brink of a great mobilization to narrow the digital divide. The needs are there, and money is certainly available. If given creative reign with telehealth, great things can come from even the smallest of libraries in these areas:

Feds Fail to Fund Urban Telehealth Parity

Currently there are 14 million people living in urban communities in the U.S. who cannot access telehealth service, yet the Federal Communications Commission and USDA will spend $5 billion this year to get telehealth and broadband to 4 million rural households.

COVID Exposes “Healthcare Gap”

And just like that, telehealth is a technology superstar. Recognition of telehealth’s potential to transform healthcare is one of the few silver linings in the COVID-19 cloud. But COVID-19 also ripped open a gaping wound within our healthcare system – a deadly inequity for African-American and other people of color. “Systemic racism and bad policy over the years created situations where African-Americans and other people of color are more susceptible to hypertension, diabetes, and the like,” said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenny on CNN.

Shave and a Haircut – and Teleheath

What happens when a prime time TV show becomes a potential healthcare policy direction, plus a side helping of broadband adoption strategy? An episode of the NBC TV medical melodrama New Amsterdam inspired a five-city telehealth pilot project involving barbershops and hair salons. The show’s medical director had a brilliant idea to enlist barbershops in African-American neighborhoods to screen customers for hypertension (high blood pressure), which leads to an overwhelming majority of the 140,000 stroke-related deaths a year.

Turning Barbershops into Telehealth Centers

In urban neighborhoods, where Internet service and health care can be hard to access, a novel pilot project uses local barbershops and salons as wireless hubs and hypertension screening centers.

Broadband Can Alleviate the Health-Care Crisis

There’s a health-care crisis in the country and it’s hitting rural areas particularly hard. The US could face a shortage of 95,000 physicians by 2025, according to a recent report from the Association of American Medical Colleges. But health care’s physician distribution problem, with too many doctors in urban areas and not enough in rural locations, could be alleviated by community broadband.

Survey Says: Telehealth + Community Broadband = Local Economic Success

The International Economic Development Council (IEDC) and I teamed up to survey the association’s members.

Like Politics, All Broadband Policy Is Local

Even though community broadband has proven itself incredibly valuable and viable, broadband is taking a beating in some areas of the country thanks to what has become a siege against municipal broadband by the large telecommunication incumbents, including AT&T, Comcast, and others.

Survey Explores Broadband Impact on Local Economies, Telehealth, Education

Everyone who’s concerned about community broadband needs to contact your economic development agency, department, whoever spearheads your community’s economic development. I’m surveying these professionals about broadband’s impact on local economies. Community broadband is advancing in many places nationwide. But it’s also taking a beating in some areas. The only way we can fight back, capture opportunities, and win challenges is to start with reliable data from those in the trenches. This is insanely important!!

Schools, Libraries are Obvious Setting for Telehealth

When communities design broadband infrastructure to facilitate healthcare and telehealth delivery, they obviously plan to connect medical practitioners’ hospitals, offices, and other healthcare facilities. Network connections to homes are growing in importance as government policies and market forces favor telehealth deployments. What about schools and libraries? In many communities, school districts and libraries outperform broadband in people’s homes.

Creative Orientation Means Success In Broadband and Telehealth

Two years ago I wrote that community broadband builders have two options for network deployment: they could use the problem-solving approach or the creation orientation approach. The problem-solving approach is typical when people deal with the government. The goal is often to make something go away.

3 Steps to Advancing Telehealth Networks

Telehealth vendors have the frustrating experience of seeing their best efforts to serve rural populations thwarted by pathetic broadband connections. Or worse, no broadband at all. At least vendors and healthcare facilities have the benefit of serving urban areas because there, the broadband is always good. Or is it? Urban broadband availability is still a problem. Cities suffer from the legacy of broadband’s origins. Three steps to advancing telehealth networks:

In Telehealth, Marketing Works

Effective, well thought-out, multi-faceted marketing can make your community broadband network more money and can cost less than sales teams alone. When Marketing work in conjunction with Sales, the network does better financially in the short- and long-term. Let’s use telehealth as an example. My 20 years of marketing work in the high-tech industry had me teaching a lot of folks in un-VC funded start-ups the values and virtues of marketing. It was easy to pigeonhole Marketing as a couple of folks creating snazzy brochures and snappy websites.

Telehealth Changes Could Help Rural Seniors Age in Place

[Commentary] Telemedicine providers can’t catch senior citizens when they fall. But health services delivered over broadband can make it possible for seniors to live independently for longer periods of time. For all of the potential that telehealth holds for assisting the aging-in-place process, telehealth’s success rides squarely on the back of quality broadband in the community. Municipal fiber networks can drive telehealth and broadband use. Small towns such as Wilson (NC) and Sebewaing (MI) with gigabit capacity infrastructure, keep subscribers happy.

Slower Speeds, Less Access: The Public Agency Response to Rural Broadband

Public entities like the Federal Communications Commission and state legislatures are supposed to look after the common good. Instead, their policies are making things tougher for small towns and rural areas anxious to improve their connectivity.

Internet Discrimination is a 'Feature,' Not a Problem, Says FCC Chief

[Commentary] On Thursday, December 14, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on a proposal to abolish net neutrality. People who care about rural America’s access to services and information should be concerned. Without net neutrality rules, consumers and the federal government have no way to prevent internet service providers from doing bad things to consumers until after the fact. And because there are no rules, how do you get providers to stop doing bad things to consumers and businesses?