Group Health provides medical coverage and care to more than 580,000 residents in Washington state and North Idaho through Group Health Cooperative or its subsidiaries, Group Health Options, Inc. Group Health Cooperative began in 1947 as a community coalition dedicated to making quality health care available and affordable. Today it is one of the few health care organizations in the country governed by consumers. Its 1

Click below to listen to Dr. O’Keefe discuss how her organization is utilizing health information technology to improve health care for patients, including a program called the Medical Home Movement. The Medical Home Movement in particular has been found to advance societal health, and thanks to broadband, is becoming more prevalent throughout Washington State.

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Click here to read the full article: www.gcxmag.com

Thanks to the vision of the Forks community, which formed a public-private partnership in 2001 to build a digital backbone along the coast of the Olympic Peninsula, the area has the broadband infrastructure necessary to support advanced telework applications.   Forks also has the other two ingredients to make rural telework work:   workforce development capacity and interest in finding and securing jobs for information workers.

That’s where Washington State University Extension comes in.   As coordinator for our telework efforts, I work with community, business, and government leaders to create jobs and cultivate the innovative and flexible leadership capabilities needed to sustain holistic rural telework initiatives, such as the one in Forks.

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• The report cites the United States as 7th fastest county in the world for broadband speeds.   20% of the broadband connections in the US are faster than 5 Mbps.  
• The report also lists the 10 fastest U.S. states.   Delaware leads with 60% of connections from the state connecting to the Akamai network at speeds over 5 Mbps.

Click here to read the full report.

In an effort to diversify the local economy, many local residents began to focus on harnessing the potential of the “Information Age” by becoming a high-tech community linked to the globe through broadband services.   The Forks experience holds great promise for the economic development of rural areas all over America.

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• Total economic impact of $3,056,439,915 if broadband deployment were increased at a reasonable level. (Connected Nation, The Economic Impact of Stimulating Broadband Nationally)

• Net job growth of 48,365 jobs from increase in broadband deployment. (Connected Nation, The Economic Impact of Stimulating Broadband Nationally)

• Seattle/Tacoma, WA ranks in the top ten markets for broadband penetration. (Scarbrough Research, “The Need for Internet Speed: Broadband Penetration Increased More than 300% Since 2002”)