Since expanded broadband networks will allow telemedicine – meaning you can see a doctor via Internet – The Knight Center of Digital Excellence is hearing questions about how this will save money and improve health services.
Here’s an example:
At the Montefiore Medical Center in New York, 85 heart failure patients use high-tech scales (the kind you weigh yourself on) to transmit potentially life-saving information to nurses. They even prompt patients by voice – through a digital monitor – to report potential symptoms of heart failure.
The result:
• Nurses can monitor nearly twice as many patients as before;
• At the earliest sign of trouble, the nurse in touch with the patient;
• For participants, time in the hospital is reduced by 50 percent.
This and other similar initiatives demonstrate the value and cost savings broadband investment brings to industries we rely on in life and death situations. Finland has one of the world’s best telemedicine programs, allowing patients to communicate with their doctors via television and remote control.
We don’t.
Unfortunately in the U.S., we don’t have the broadband networks in the rural areas that would most benefit from telemedicine services.
That’s about to change. The federal stimulus plan earmarks $19 billion for the expansion of health care information technology. That’s in addition to broadband investments in rural communities.
Advances in telemedicine and the benefits seen by the select few that have access to it yet again show how broadband development - and the innovation that comes with it - will better our quality of life.
Want more information on how broadband expansion can benefit telemedicine services and impact our healthcare industry? Read “Broadband expansion is just what the doctor ordered.”
