Telehealth

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.

Bridging the digital divide can help address our nation’s persistent health disparities. Rural Americans not only face limited access to health-care facilities, but “suffer from higher rates of obesity, mental health issues, diabetes, cancer, and opioid addiction.” But the tie that also binds is the lack of high-speed broadband connectivity in low-income communities, too. Rural America, as you know, is facing a physician shortage and low-income and rural populations are less likely to have choice when it comes to broadband providers.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai visited Abilene (KS) Memorial Hospital recently to observe how broadband connects the local emergency department with specialists in South Dakota.  “5G promises speeds that are 100 times as fast as 4G LTE,” Chairman Pai said. “The amount of data that you can send wirelessly will be much greater.

This tech summit is focusing on an important topic: improving the lives of Mississippians through communications technologies. Already today, you’ve heard discussions about the next generation of wireless connectivity and the new applications and services that they’ll enable.

Access to health care is a critical problem in many rural areas of the United States. Few physicians choose to practice in rural counties, according to the National Rural Health Association, yet the rural population is, on average, older and more in need of medical care. Census Bureau data show that 18 percent of the rural population is age 65 or older, compared with 13 percent in urban areas. Rural clinics and hospitals are consolidating or closing, leaving people to drive long distances to see doctors. Policymakers are counting on telemedicine to fill in the gaps.

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

We need to lift rural communities up as places of opportunity, both for this generation and future ones. That work begins by deploying investment and innovation to secure the health of all rural residents. Mayor Pete's rural health policies will:

The US ranks forty-sixth when it comes to pregnancy-related deaths and is the only industrialized country in the world with an increasing maternal mortality rate. Maternal mortality is a particularly striking issue in rural America.

The Federal Communications Commission reformed the Rural Health Care Program (RHC) aiming to ensure limited program funds are disbursed efficiently and equitably, promote transparency and predictability in the program’s administration, and strengthen safeguards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The action takes a number of steps to reform the distribution of RHC funding, in particular by revising the rules governing the Telecom Program to simplify calculation of the urban rate—the amount health care providers pay—and the rural rate—the amount that service providers receive.