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BfA blog: Broadband Adoption is Critical for Healthcare Advances
While most of the discussion over public health these days surrounds the Congressional debate over health care reform, there are a number of advances in health care that have already been made, and could be further implemented with an increase in broadband access and adoption.
High-speed Internet access creates several advantages for both doctors and their patients. Patients can create a personal health file online that can be accessed by their primary doctors, specialists or emergency responders. On a more basic level, access to broadband allows patients to screen potential doctors online not only through user-moderated forums and privately run websites, but even by watching their prospective surgeon at work through videos of actual surgical procedures posted on YouTube and on healthcare provider sites such as our own Emery King's Medical Video Library posted up by the Detroit Medical Center.
Conversely, doctors can use specific medical-based applications on mobile devices (such as the iPhone) to send and receive procedural information like x-ray scans and patient records to and from their offices. Even something as simple as forwarding a prescription to a pharmacy can be streamlined through email and/or text. More advanced technologies allow physicians to conduct highly specialized procedures with increased accuracy and reduced recovery time for the patient.
Moving forward, increasing broadband access to rural and lower income areas can have a myriad of potential benefits by enhancing the coordination between mobile health centers in order to give doctors, specialists, and emergency responders all the information they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Increased adoption will also give individuals in these same areas access to increased information about healthcare and general wellness news.
Looking to the future (which is what we do at Health Futures Digest), we anticipate a rapid change over the next five years to a three-dimensional Internet. That will be a revolution as great as the move from black-and-white motion pictures to color movies, or from the early pure-text Internet to today's graphical Web. And that will require even broader bandwidth. By acting now, we can prevent another gap opening up between those with access to enough bandwidth, and those without.
Broadband for America Blog
Julian Bond is Co-Editor of the Health Futures Digest, a monthly digest of news/commentary on current and future leading-edge technology and innovations in the medical and health world.
High-speed Internet access creates several advantages for both doctors and their patients. Patients can create a personal health file online that can be accessed by their primary doctors, specialists or emergency responders. On a more basic level, access to broadband allows patients to screen potential doctors online not only through user-moderated forums and privately run websites, but even by watching their prospective surgeon at work through videos of actual surgical procedures posted on YouTube and on healthcare provider sites such as our own Emery King's Medical Video Library posted up by the Detroit Medical Center.
Conversely, doctors can use specific medical-based applications on mobile devices (such as the iPhone) to send and receive procedural information like x-ray scans and patient records to and from their offices. Even something as simple as forwarding a prescription to a pharmacy can be streamlined through email and/or text. More advanced technologies allow physicians to conduct highly specialized procedures with increased accuracy and reduced recovery time for the patient.
Moving forward, increasing broadband access to rural and lower income areas can have a myriad of potential benefits by enhancing the coordination between mobile health centers in order to give doctors, specialists, and emergency responders all the information they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Increased adoption will also give individuals in these same areas access to increased information about healthcare and general wellness news.
Looking to the future (which is what we do at Health Futures Digest), we anticipate a rapid change over the next five years to a three-dimensional Internet. That will be a revolution as great as the move from black-and-white motion pictures to color movies, or from the early pure-text Internet to today's graphical Web. And that will require even broader bandwidth. By acting now, we can prevent another gap opening up between those with access to enough bandwidth, and those without.
Broadband for America Blog
Julian Bond is Co-Editor of the Health Futures Digest, a monthly digest of news/commentary on current and future leading-edge technology and innovations in the medical and health world.
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