Presentation to WV Legislature Interim Committee 10/16/2006

1. Transforming Health Care in West Virginia through Telehealth and Broadband Access David Campbell, CEO and Jack L. Shaffer, Jr. Chief Information Officer

4. Sixty-four percent of the State’s population lives in a rural area

5. Most of the rural areas are medically underserved

6. Many rural areas are also health professional shortage areas

8. A number of rural areas lack access to mental health services

9. Access to dental health is also an issue in many rural areas

13. Connectivity is essential for Health Information Exchange and Care Coordination Hospital Patient Assisted Living Skilled nursing Primary Care Physician Specialist Laboratories Radiology Hospice payer Pharmacy Home care Find the patient record.

15. Medically Underserved Areas are also underserved with Broadband

17. Telemedicine Benefits Savings from broadband are potentially enormous. Robert Litan – vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and also a senior fellow in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution – identified up to $927 billion in cost savings and output benefits from “business as usual” broadband deployment and an additional $532 billion - $847 billion in economic benefits from accelerated broadband deployment that can be available to help ease America’s transition to an older society.

18. Broadband is a Must “ Broadband is not a technology that simply delivers more movies, videos, sports, and other forms of instant gratification. As Robert Litan shows, it can improve the lives of the elderly who account for a large and growing share of the population,” Dr. Robert W. Crandall of the Brookings Institute said in a statement. Source: Information Week – December 2005

19. Telemedicine Benefits In profiling advances in telemedicine, Technology Daily described a "rural telestroke clinical network" developed by the Medical College of Georgia. The program, which treats patients who experience cluster strokes, uses mobile carts in emergency departments in the state's rural hospitals to allow physicians to remotely evaluate patients online, examine brain images and perform medical examinations. The acute ischemic stroke system is capable of handling video streams but not voice streams because of low bandwidth, so physicians must speak on the phone while specialists examine patients online. Currently, specialists provide their services at no cost to the eight hospitals connected to the Medical College because the Medicare reimbursement requirements for telehealth require both video and voice streams, which rural areas are not capable of due to the limited bandwidths. Physicians have a three-hour window to perform exams and prescribe medicine to reverse the impact of a stroke, said Max Stachura, director of the Medical College and president of APT. The low bandwidth increases the time needed to load the images, narrowing that window, TechnologyDaily reports.

20. Broadband is a Must Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the House Energy and Commerce Committee's ranking Democrat, on Thursday said that broadband technology can have a "leveling effect" on access to health care, TechnologyDaily reports. The lack of high-speed online service in remote and rural areas restricts the use of advances in telemedicine, supporters of high-speed Internet deployment said at an event sponsored by the Alliance for Public Technology. Source: iHealthBeat – July 2005

25. Barriers Current U.S. laws also run counter to the technology. For instance, Americans can't use Asian equipment that allows diabetics to use cell phones fitted with blood testing kits. The reason? A cell phone is not an approved medical device. Medical licensing laws also don't allow a specialist in certain states to monitor the health of a patient in another state, shutting off some patients from a specialist. In addition, the technology is so new that most insurers won't reimburse hospitals for the costs, so most health providers absorb it as a cost of doing business -- at least for now.

26. Barriers Even so, barriers remain that slow telemedicine's growth, said Russell Bodoff, executive director of the Center For Aging Services Technologies, which last month made a presentation at a White House conference. One major barrier is that only 40 percent of Americans have access to broadband. That compares with 75 percent in Japan and South Korea. The United States ranks 18th in the world in broadband access. "It's absolutely essential to get broadband to more citizens," Bodoff said.

28. For More Information: Call 304-201-5700 Or visit us on the web: www.chnwv.org