Healthcare reformists should hijack bandwidth agenda

Last month, I referenced FCC chairman Julius Genachowski's warning of a "looming spectrum crisis." At the time I said that with wireless traffic set for a thirty-fold increase due to the rise of online video and other bandwidth-heavy applications, the government was scrambling to figure out where this much-needed bandwidth would come from. They're still scrambling, but now there's new fuel for the fire: the wireless sensor networks that we rely upon so heavily for homeland security surveillance, smart-grid technologies and--you guessed it--telemedicine programs, may well eclipse consumer demand in the not too distant future.

As John Horrigan, Consumer Research Director of the FCC's National Broadband Plan, summed it up on Monday during a panel discussion on broadband innovation and investment at the Brookings Institution: "Machine-to-machine will be increasingly important…Today video is driving the demand for consumers. In the future, it will be machine-to-machine that will have tremendous demands on the infrastructure." He went on to remind us that the demands of telemedicine today will be the demands of regular consumers five years from now.

Before joining the FCC's broadband task force, Horrigan was associate director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, according to an article on TheHill.com. He's responsible for directing most of the research concerning broadband adoption that has been cited over and over since the FCC began the process of developing a national plan.

Right now, the health IT community is consumed with EMR implementations and the long-waited definition of meaningful use. But as the telehealth networks currently in development go mainstream, and as hospital mobility initiatives grow to exacerbate the bandwidth crunch, we're going to discover that the health reform experiment currently underway won't have luxury of blossoming under ideal lab conditions. As important as healthcare is, it's not the only game in town. Reform won't happen in a vacuum. It will be hammered out, through a long and arduous series of trade-offs necessitated by other, equally pressing "crises," both real and manufactured (think energy, transportation, climate change--just to name a few).

It's with this reality in mind that the policy panels, trade groups, politicos and others leading the health reform charge should broaden their focus to include a stake in the bandwidth game right now, before demand for broadband escalates further. Because higher taxes and tiered ISP pricing will only take us so far.