Widespread use of electronic health records to require broadband

Computerworld - The shift of medical information in the U.S. from paper records to electronic health records (EHR), a move unveiled yesterday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (see story), will require broadband connectivity for health care providers and possibly patients, according to health care experts.
Rachelle Schultz, president of Winona Health in Winona, Minn., said fast Internet connections are needed because an EHR includes not only text files containing notes from doctors and nurses but also fat medical image files such as X-rays. "You need broadband to pull that kind of information," she said.
Winona Health, which operates the Community Memorial Hospital in Winona as well as a nursing home and an outpatient clinic, has used an EHR system called PowerChart for about three years. Developed by Cerner Corp., PowerChart can be accessed by both doctors and patients, though only doctors have access to the image files.
Dr. Brent James, vice president for research at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health Care Inc., which has placed 1 million patient records on an EHR system, agreed that development of a nationwide system would require broadband connectivity.
Scott Mackenzie, vice president of the providing care division of North Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner, said physicians in daily practice as well as at hospitals and clinics would need a high-speed connection to access an EHR, though they could use dial-up access to occasionally check text files.
That's no problem for 80% of the population in Utah, James said, who live in an urban corridor near Salt Lake City and have either cable or Digital Subscriber Line broadband access. But it could present a problem for physicians or patients in more remote parts of the state.
Winona also has extensive broadband connectivity, Schultz said, as does much of the country. Almost half of active U.S. Internet users have high-speed connections at home, according to the July 2004 "Bandwidth Report" from Web Site Optimization LLC.
But even as cable and telephone companies continue to push high-speed Internet service throughout the country, 25 million rural U.S. households will never be able to get either service, according to Kelli Laski. a spokeswoman for the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) in Herndon, Va. With that in mind, the NRTC has invested in and will resell services from a high-powered satellite operated by WildBlue Communications Inc. in Greenwood Village, Colo.
WildBlue has lifetime leases on the Ka-Band transponders on the Anik F2 satellite launched last Saturday. These spot-beam transponders can provide affordable high-speed Internet service to anyone in theU.S. "with a view of the southern sky," according to Brad Greenwald, vice president for sales and marketing at WildBlue.
Laski said WildBlue would support access to EHRs.
Despite the need for broadband connectivity for widespread implementation of a national EHR system, the plan unveiled yesterday by federal officials was silent on that issue, as well as on the question of who would pay for the connectivity.