One of the very important sectors of society that broadband is helping to improve is health care.  With firm evidence of the progress that broadband-enabled telemedicine applications provide in treatment, costs, and overall efficiency, the FCC is charging forward with their rural telemedicine plan.  NPR’s All Things Considered took note with a feature yesterday walking listeners (and readers) through examples of the opportunities broadband powers in rural health care.

Two afternoons a week, Dr. Alison Semrad, an endocrinologist, sits at a desk and consults with patients over a broadband video conference.

In a recent conference, Laura McKewan sat in a chair in front of a camera at a clinic 300 miles away in Eureka. She has Addison’s disease, a rare condition that affects the adrenal glands. McKewan would have to drive six hours to San Francisco to see an endocrinologist, so she jumped at the chance to consult with Semrad.

This comes on the heels of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s recent trip to a Seattle Children’s Hospital for a demonstration of their video conferencing system, which is improving their patient care.  Of course, this is just the beginning.  As facilities and patients adopt broadband at greater rates, more people in rural areas will be able to embrace video conferencing as a standard part of their health care.  In fact, the vice president of information systems of Kadlec, the company that demonstrated at this event, predicts that eventually “they’re going to become as commonplace as telephones.” Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/08/14/1301149/kadlec-talks-to-specialists-via.html#ixzz0wyUELyfm

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As health IT becomes a growing part of the national agenda, it’s only fitting that leaders of the health 2.0 movement bring the Health 2.0 Conference, which originated in San Francisco in 2007, to Washington, DC.   Conference attendees varied from companies, to physicians, to patient advocates, to government officials, all there to share technologies and discuss both the challenges and opportunities that these technologies bring.  Led by conference organizers Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, topics of discussion included driving adoption, the role of the consumer, data liberation, and much more.

Farzad Mostashari, Deputy Director of the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, gave one of the keynote addresses.  Since part of Mostashari’s job is to manage the taxpayers’ investment in health IT, he shared five principles that the Office uses to aid in applying the “meaningful use” standard required by law:

1)   Put the patient and their interests in the center

2)   Focus on the outcomes, not the technology

3)   Foster innovation using the market

4)   Watch out for the little guy (interoperability)

5)   Monitor and adapt (be evidence based)

If you’d like to add input or join the conversation, Mostashari recommends engaging on the recently launched Federal Advisory Community blog.

The conference concluded with Federal CTO, Aneesh Chopra, delivering a striking keynote, which you can watch below.  A firm believer in the power of participation and collaboration, Chopra was proud to be a part of the conference announcement of the “Health 2.0 Developer Challenge”, a project to bring together people with relevant expertise to work together on Health 2.0 projects.

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That apple a day may still be valuable, but so is our connected future.

Yesterday, The Dallas Morning News took a closer look at how AT&T and other high-tech companies are working to create innovative, connected devices for the medical community to better track patient health.

There are many players involved, from patients to insurers to hospitals, but doctors are confident that with mobile devices automatically transmitting information, they are much more likely to catch important indicators in a timely fashion.

These interceptions are found to be considerably helpful in preventing more serious situations.

Such early interventions could prevent many of the acute attacks that gradually transform a functional person into an invalid. They may also help save society from financing costly emergency room visits and other intensive treatments.

AT&T’s Bob Miller is quoted in the article acknowledging that these are not new technologies, but that they are being used in new ways—connecting good, old-fashioned thermometers, scales and blood-pressure cuffs to care providers via the Internet. With the success seen with early efforts, such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ treating 35,000 patients via connected medicine, experts like Ron Banister, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Texas Tech, predict increasingly commonplace telehealth use in the next two to three years.

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Click below to view archived footage from May 21 as the Steering Committee on Telehealth and Health Care Informatics held a briefing titled “The Personal Health Record Meets the Electronic Medical Record: Getting the Healthcare Information Right Toward Patient Safety.” Briefing participants included Jeff Margolis, TriZetto chairman and chief executive officer, Alfred Spector, Google Health vice president of research and special initiatives, Deven McGraw, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology Health Privacy Project and key congressional offices.

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