by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | February 05, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“When you think about the incentive payments and achieving meaningful use, none of that matters if you don’t have access to a broadband connection that can facilitate any type of electronic transfer,” Fernandez says.
What is broadband, anyway?
One of the main troubles of approaching the broadband problem is figuring out what everyone means by “broadband.” It’s difficult to find an answer to the problem when no one can agree on the question.
The FCC told DOTmed News it was not a “regulatory term.”
But for the purposes of benchmarking, in a report released in September, the FCC defined broadband as 4 megabytes per second downstream, and 1 mbps upstream. This definition is not agreed upon by everyone, the agency found. Under this classification, 68 percent of U.S. residential connections sold as broadband are not, in fact, broadband. And medical needs can be higher. A single-physician practice could get by with 4 mbps, the FCC said. But for diagnostic image transfer and video consultation, the agency suggests at least 10 mbps. And for large hospitals, the needs are greater: 100 mbps to 10 times that.
“Certainly a 6 mbps line would get you what you need for most applications, going upstream. But someone in our membership will say you’ll need 15 mbps. There’s a lot of debate,” Jonathan Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association, says.
It’s also a moving target. Linkous notes that 1.1 mps up and downstream used to be high-speed, but now it’s slow. Fifteen years ago, he observes, when the ATA was formed, 2 mbps would have been blisteringly fast.
“What is high speed today is not going to be high speed 20 years from now or 10 years from now,” he says.
Ease of access
For providers, improving technologies and widening adoption rates translate into lower costs. The truth is, broadband access has steadily improved over the past decade. “The cost of broadband certainly has come down considerably over the last 10 years, even the last two years,” says Linkous. “It’s not the barrier it used to be.”
This is partly the result of active policies by some states, such as Texas and California, which encourage carriers to reach their large rural populations.
“With a few limited exceptions, [broadband access] is not a huge problem in Texas,” says Don McBeath, director of advocacy and communications with the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals, or TORCH. “It’s pretty common for most rural hospitals to have multiple T1 lines going into them, at what they would consider a fairly affordable rate.”
