“Most people aren’t aware of FCC’s www.fcc.gov involvement in healthcare as related to advanced healthcare technologies,” according to Christopher Gibbons, MD, FCC’s Chief Health Innovation Officer for the Connect2Health Task Force (C2HFCC) www.fcc.gov/general/fcc-connect-2-health-consumer-information. He was the keynote speaker at the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center (MATRC) Summit www.MATRCSummit.org held April 10-12, 2016 in Cambridge Maryland.
The C2HFCC has been charged with exploring the intersection of broadband, advanced technology, and health. The task force promotes effective policy and regulatory solutions to encourage broadband adoption, to identify regulatory barriers and incentives, and to deploy health technologies and devices.
The agency works to highlight effective telehealth projects, broadband-enabled health technologies, focuses on mhealth applications across the country and abroad, and administers the Universal Service Administration Company’s (USAC) www.usac.org/rhc Rural Healthcare Program on behalf of the FCC.
Dr. Gibbons presented his views on how technologies will be used in the future. Smart care systems will prevail and the network of care systems will enable proactive, and predictive personalized care to prevail.
For example in a truly connected world, it will be possible for an asthmatic person to electronically detect an oncoming asthmatic attack. In addition, technology will be able to treat the home environment and perhaps prevent future asthmatic attacks.
Dr. Gibbons sees vast changes such as the use of avatars programmed to interact with people in front of a computer along with the use virtual reality to interact with patients. In the future this will be completely accepted and very ordinary.
A concept on the horizon called holoportation http://research.microsoft.com/holoportation combines mixed reality displays to allow users to see, hear, and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in the same physical space. In a few years, communicating and interacting with remote patients in 3D will become as natural as face-to-face communication is today.
According to Dr. Gibbons, retail healthcare is shaking up healthcare in general. He talked about how Walmart plans to use retail healthcare and telehealth technologies in their 5,800 stores in neighborhoods where people live. He pointed out, Walmart can afford to lose money on the retail health venture, since the stores can make it up on food and other products sold in the store.
He also mentioned how another retail venture such as the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a good candidate to provide retail services. Today UPS is losing money but has several assets that could meet the needs of retail health services.
USPS is near people, in the main streets of communities, and has access to every address in every community. As a result, USPS reaches millions of people every day. In addition, they have a large mobile truck fleet plus 8,000 letter carriers out every day on foot and perhaps could help in emergency situations. In addition, post offices today have extra space where they could operate retail clinics that could use telehealth resources to communicate with health professionals throughout the community.