America’s efforts to support telehealth still not up to par
The COVID-19 pandemic has come to be defined by staggering statistics.
According to analysts at Forrester Research, telehealth visits are expected to top 900 million in 2020 and may approach 1 billion due to COVID-19.
For example, Northern Light Health, an integrated healthcare system with hospitals in rural Maine, indicated they conducted 36,000 telehealth visits in April 2020 alone, compared to just 7,500 visits all of last year. Though staggering, the increase in demand is to be expected due to the impact of COVID-19. Unfortunately, America’s healthcare and broadband infrastructures are not prepared.
In response, legislators in both the U.S. House and Senate have introduced bipartisan bills to increase funding and subsidy rates for healthcare network development via the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Rural Health Care Program.
The House legislation, sponsored by U.S. Representatives Anna Eshoo (D-california) and Don Young (R-alaska), was passed as part of the Heroes Act. The Senate version, sponsored by U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-hawaii) and Lisa Murkowski (Ralaska), has since acquired numerous sponsors from each party and we hope it is included in the Senate’s next round of COVID legislation.
In crafting the companion bills, sponsors sought insight from our organizations: Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition and Healthconnect Networks. SHLB’S mission is to promote open, affordable, high-capacity broadband internet to anchor institutions and their communities.
Healthconnect Networks helps healthcare systems design data and telehealth networks and procure funding through the Healthcare Connect Fund and serves over 2000 healthcare system sites nationwide. The legislation will provide emergency supplemental funding for the FCC’S Rural Health Care (RHC) program so that healthcare providers can upgrade their telehealth services.
The legislation is based largely on an analysis conducted by SHLB and Healthconnect Networks that established both the number of healthcare sites that will seek FCC RHC funding and what their average need will be.
Consequently, the legislation calls for $2 billion in supplemental funding and streamlined applications processes to make sure that healthcare providers across the country are able to increase their broadband capacity immediately. The $2 billion requested accurately reflects the demand and the costs of the broadband connectivity needed to address this crisis.
COVID-19 is affecting people in all regions of the United States, something that is reflected in the geographic diversity of the legislation’s sponsors. Consequently, eligibility should be open to all hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers, public health facilities and non-profit providers regardless of rurality.
According to our calculations, there are approximately 90,000 non-profit health care sites (urban and rural) in the U.S. We expect approximately 70% (63,000) of these sites will seek funding from the FCC’S RHC program in the coming year. This “take rate” is about twice the current demand, underscoring the necessity of the legislation.
We also endorse the bill’s provisions that expedite the distribution of this funding.
We support the provisions that direct the FCC to adopt and implement a rolling application process that allows urban and rural healthcare providers to apply for funding at any time; temporarily waives the competitive bidding rules to allow health care providers to immediately obtain funding to upgrade their existing level of service from their provider; issue funding decisions for each completed application within 60 days after the application is filed; release funding within 30 days of an invoice being submitted; and delay the implementation of the rural/urban database, which could cause significant hardship to rural healthcare providers and patients.
The actions contained in the legislation will help the nation’s healthcare providers upgrade their telehealth networks and services and address the critical needs of our population to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic as quickly as possible.
For all that is at stake, and the efficient solutions contained within the legislation, we urge its passage.
John Windhausen, Jr. is the executive director of SHLB. James E. Rogers, Jr. is president of Healthconnect Networks.