FCC emphasized to expand $400 Million cap for Rural Health Care Program

The Universal Service Fund of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is playing a key role in advancing access to high-quality care in rural America through telehealth programs and technologies. Although, funding for the FCC’s Rural Health Care Program isn’t sufficient to meet growing requirements for telemedicine services.

That is the contention of Karen Rheuban, MD, director of the Center for Telehealth at the University of Virginia (UVA), which is also home to the Health Resources and Services Administration-funded Mid Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center, through which technical assistance is provided to providers and systems across eight states and the District of Columbia.

The FCC’s Rural Health Care Program gives funding to eligible providers for telecommunications and broadband services. The aim of the program is to make better the quality of care available to patients in rural communities. Funding for the Rural Health Care Program is capped at $400 million yearly.

“Telemedicine effectively reduces the significant challenges of workforce shortages and geographic disparities in access to care, supported by secure broadband communications services—a critical underpinning of any telehealth program,” claimed Rheuban, during Tuesday’s Senate subcommittee hearing on the FCC’s Universal Service Fund and the deployment of broadband in rural America.

In accordance with Rheuban, a pediatric cardiologist, the UVA telehealth program was developed more than 20 years ago and has saved Virginians “millions of miles” of travel and improved patient outcomes.

“We depend on the FCC Rural Health Care Program for connectivity between facilities. Absent the program, our capability to offer these services would be severely constrained,” she told lawmakers.

However, Rheuban pointed out that “utilization has highly increased, and recently the $400 million funding cap, developed by the Commission in 1998, was exceeded.” In addition, she said the FCC has “recently mitigated support by 7.5%, and this has created hardships for many states.”

As an outcome, Rheuban called on the FCC to expand the $400 million funding cap that it created almost two decades ago. “If this is not feasible, we urge Congress and the FCC to explore additional federal options to support costly infrastructure build-outs for rural healthcare providers,” she added.

Moreover, Rheuban suggested expanding eligible healthcare providers under the Rural Health Care Program to include emergency medical service personnel and community paramedics, consistent with the public health and public safety provisions.

“We also recommend involving wireless technologies as eligible under the Rural Health Care Program, particularly as we strive to improve chronic disease management with remote monitoring tools,” she said.

“The Rural Health Care Program is foundational to a modernized healthcare delivery system and as such—along with other efforts—must be sustained, expanded and further modernized to fulfill the promise of healthcare in the twenty-first Century,” Rheuban summarized.

 

Connect2Health Task Force report mentions ‘critical need’ counties

The Connect2Health Task Force has issued an update to its research on the availability of broadband health services, recognizing counties in which there is a critical need for increased availability.

The group, supporting the health technology attempts of the Federal Communication Commission, issued new priority lists of “critical need” counties in broadband and health, which are among those most in requirement of broadband health solutions or are “digitally isolated.”

The findings were involved in the group’s update of its “Mapping Broadband Health in America” platform, which the federal agency issued on the day of Thursday. The latest set of information depicts the latest complete annual fixed broadband data from the FCC and updated health data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings.

“As telehealth, telemedicine and other cutting-edge mHealth initiatives gain momentum across the country, this web-based mapping platform enables more effective, data-driven decision making at the intersection of broadband and health,” claims Michele Ellison, chair of the Connect2Health Task Force FCC.

The fixed broadband data in the mapping update was released in the year of December 2016, covering information submissions as of December 2015. The health information is drawn from the 2017 release of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation County Health Rankings & Roadmap. This map data update provided the Task Force with a chance to look at broadband and health data between years.

The group’s estimation of places most needing broadband health support are dubbed “The Priority 2017” and “Rural Priority 2017.” It targets to mention places of the country that are seeing increases in chronic diseases and shortages of medical services.

“We identify that the upturn in closures of rural hospitals and medical facilities, mentioned in recent research at the University of North Carolina, is of high concern to many,” Ellison claims. “The mapping platform shines a critical spotlight on the requirement for broadband health solutions in rural and digitally isolated counties where physician shortages are more than double the national average. It also indicates the significance of initiatives to promote broadband infrastructure deployment.”

Among the findings in the 2017 report:

• The number of individuals living in “double burden” counties—those with high levels of chronic sickness and lacking broadband access—has increased to more than 36 million, in accordance with the 2015 data. Almost half of U.S. counties have high burdens of chronic disease as well as a requirement for greater broadband connectivity.

• More than 60% of rural Americans live in “double burden” counties, while less than 5% of urban America falls into the similar category.

• Few 214 counties—175 of which are primarily rural—have broadband access below 50% and diabetes and obesity rates above the national average.

• Preventable hospitalizations are 150% higher in the least connected counties compared with other counties.

The Connect2Health Task Force also launched a new analytical product, the Positive Trend Counties inventory, which compares broadband and health data year by year, hence identifying priority counties that have made progress on broadband or health measures, no longer meeting the thresholds as “critical need” counties.

The report mentions the issues the nation faces in better using broadband services to care for needy populations, says Mignon Clyburn, commissioner of the FCC.

“I’m glad that the Commission is demonstrating its continued commitment to the Connect2Health Task Force and the Mapping Broadband Health in America platform with the release of today’s update,” she says. “For far too several rural and underserved consumers, the broadband health picture remains bleak.

“The work of the Connect2Health Task Force is far from done. Armed with the robust input from stakeholders across the country along with the data and information that is pouring into the Commission in response to the latest Connect2Health Public Notice, the Task Force staff are working to make suggestions to the Commission about how best to architect broadband health policy to meet the requirements of rural and underserved Americans.”