HRSA Grants to Help Assess Rural Broadband Capacity for Telehealth
The federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has awarded $8 million to fund the Telehealth Broadband Pilot (TBP) program, which will assess the broadband capacity available to rural healthcare providers and patient communities to improve their access to telehealth services.
The TBP program is a three-year pilot and the result of the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed on Sept. 1, 2020, by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The memorandum also created the Rural Telehealth Initiative, a cross cutting, multi-department initiative that coordinates programs to expand broadband capacity and increase telehealth access to improve health care in rural America.
Through the TBP program, $6.5 million was awarded to the National Telehealth Technology Assessment Resource Center (TTAC), based out of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. The TTAC offers technology assessment and help selecting appropriate technologies for a variety of telehealth services. TTAC will implement the TBP in four state community locations, including Alaska, Michigan, Texas and West Virginia. TTAC will also work with the Rural Telehealth Initiative's federal partners to improve rural communities' access to broadband and telehealth services through existing funding opportunities and grant programs.
In a statement, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) described the importance of the work and detailed how it will proceed. It noted that ensuring that sufficient bandwidth and high-enough quality connectivity for clinically valuable telehealth visits with the patient is one of those challenges. Even with testing connections, hardware and running through the process with patients prior to their first telehealth visit, users sometimes experience changes in the quality of the connection, the ANTHC said. When this happens, patients can become frustrated and resistant to utilizing the technology in the future. This funding will allow us to know the quality of the connection in advance, increasing success for patients and avoiding a very labor-intensive process of testing connectivity.
Some technologies, such as Zoom, work better than others over satellite or low-bandwidth connections. To improve the patient experience and provide better care, it is important to know more about the types of connectivity available in rural areas and use technology that work best over that connectivity.
The Consortium will learn about, measure, and report the data it finds regarding the quality and speed of connectivity in rural areas and use the best-performing technologies for telehealth. In the short term, the Consortium can use this data to make better decisions and planning for telehealth to patients, and reduce the labor and time spent testing connectivity. In the long term, this data will be used to drive policy and infrastructure changes to improve connectivity to rural clinics and homes across Alaska.
HRSA's Federal Office of Rural Health Policy also awarded the Telehealth-Focused Rural Health Research Center based at the University of Arkansas $1.5 million to evaluate the TBP program across all participating communities and to serve as a resource on telehealth for rural communities around the nation.
"HHS has made it a priority to transform rural healthcare, including through innovations like telehealth, where we've seen many years' worth of progress in just the past year," said U.S. Health & Human Services Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan, in a statement. "As someone who hails from rural America, supporting delivery of care in the most remote parts of America, like Alaska, is a personal passion of mine, and telehealth is a crucial part of that work. This telehealth pilot program is part of the Rural Action Plan that HHS launched this past year, which lays out a path forward to coordinate agency efforts to transform and improve rural health care in tangible ways."
