FCC https://www.fcc.gov Chairman Ajit Pai at the Health Innovation Alliance Forum https://health-innovation.org/thecoalition presented his agency’s achievements and the rapid success of telehealth which resulted from the immediate need for medical care resulting from COVID-19.
As Chairman Pai said, “One of the most important ways that the FCC worked to meet the need in rural areas was to make an additional $42 million available through FCC’s Rural Health Care Program which is part of the Universal Service Fund.”
As the Chairman explained, “Since 1997, annual funding for the Rural Health Care Program was capped at $400 million even though the population increased and connected care demand expanded. In 2018, the FCC raised the budget for the first time in the program’s two decade history by more than 40% to $571 million and going forward the budget will be adjusted for inflation.”
The FCC voted in April to set up a three year $100 million Connected Care Pilot Program. This pilot aims to boost health care providers’ connected care efforts and also provide data to help determine how universal service subsidies can help telehealth transform healthcare delivery in ways that are patient and provider friendly.
The FCC is now involved in new digital health innovations and has advanced to 5G networks which will be able to support the real-time high quality video needed for the most advanced forms of telemedicine. The 5G networks will fuel exponential growth for the Internet of Things which will be able to support remote patient monitoring and foster device innovation.
Currently, the FCC is pursuing a three pronged strategy to free up spectrum, promote wireless infrastructure, and modernize regulations to encourage fiber deployment. As a result, the amount of spectrum available for 5G has substantially been increased along with a 12-fold increase in the number of new cell sites deployed over the past three years.
The FCC recently made the entire 6 GHz band available for unlicensed use. By doing this, the FCC has increased the amount of mid-band spectrum available for Wi-Fi by almost a factor of five. In addition, FCC is creating a massive 1,200 megahertz testbed for innovators and innovations.
The next generation of Wi-Fi called Wi-Fi 6 is already rolling out and will be over two and a half times faster than the current standard. Wi-Fi 6 will offer better performance for connected devices. FCC expects entrepreneurs to use this band to push the boundaries of what is possible with telemedicine, in terms of high bandwidth virtual and augmented reality services, to low bandwidth IoT applications.