FCC Vows Action on Wireless Health Technologies
In a nod to mobile health’s growing importance, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it wants to help make mHealth a routine best practice within five years.
To make this happen, the FCC needs to increase interagency collaboration and information sharing, and increase wireless capacity, reliability, and safety of mobile health technologies, according to a report from an independent task force assembled by the agency.
The report, mHealth Task Force: Findings and Recommendations, was released on Sept. 24.
“mHealth can improve patient care and create cost savings by capturing information for providers, analyzing information to better understand a person’s health trends over time, allowing patients to have easy access to their health information, mining data to improve cost transparency, increasing efficiencies across the continuum of care, and enabling more accurate diagnoses and treatment,” reads the report, mHealth Task Force: Findings and Recommendations.
Responding to the report, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced in a press release on Sept. 24 that the agency will:
- Consider an order to streamline the FCC’s experimental licensing rules to promote and encourage the creation of wireless health device “test beds” to permit easier testing of mHealth technologies.
- Renew the search for a permanent FCC healthcare director.
- Consider an order to comprehensively reform and modernize the Rural Health Care (RHC) Program to include rules to permit networks of hospital and health care facilities to jointly apply for RHC Program funds to boost broadband capacity and enable electronic health records.
The report concludes that healthcare is grappling with high costs, especially with the transition from paper to electronic health records. It cites a report released on Sept. 6 from the Institute of Medicine, Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America, which says the total waste in healthcare could be as high as $765 billion annually.
The task force identified barriers to mHealth adoption, such as a lack of access to broadband coverage for providers and patients, and an absence of secure messaging between health information systems. This summer, the task force interviewed experts in the private sector, government, and academia.
Its recommendations include the hiring of an FCC healthcare director to address these barriers, launching a healthcare website, and providing expertise for the FDA on wireless medical devices.
The agency also needs to make more licensed spectrum available for mobile broadband. “Additional licensed mobile spectrum will help meet future spectrum demands and ensure reliable mobile broadband connectivity for spectrum intensive healthcare services (live video, radiological imaging, etc),” the report reads.
The task force’s co-chairs are Julius Goldman, director of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology Program on Interoperability; Robert Jarrin, senior director of government affairs for Qualcomm; and Douglas Trauner, CEO of Health Analytic Services, Inc.
For more information, click here (PDF).
Posted: September 27, 2012