Health Care and Broadband Outreach in Pennsylvania
Good morning. I’m Mark A. Piasio, MD, MBA, a practicing orthopedic surgeon from DuBois, and president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society. I want to thank Chairman Wonderling for the opportunity to testify about how a grant from the Broadband Outreach and Aggregation Fund will enable the Pennsylvania Medical Society to begin a sea change that will ultimately help physicians and hospitals provide better care to their patients.
With our 18,000 member physicians, we at the Pennsylvania Medical Society recognize that many physicians lack the necessary broadband network connectivity necessary to use integrated medical records systems, access real-time medical information, enable telehealth and telemedicine applications, or access rich-media continuous training and education materials. Integrating these types of applications into physician practices not only helps reduce administrative costs, but can also provide patients with improved and timelier medical care.
Health information technology applications—electronic medical records, computerized physician order entry, personal health records, and electronic prescribing—have value well beyond the technology itself. The primary value of these tools is to reduce the incidence of medical errors and improve clinical outcomes. Other benefits, such as administrative efficiencies and higher revenue through more accurate coding of services, while attractive, do not alone justify the acquisition cost and implementation effort to physicians. The initial implementation cost—hardware, software, labor, and loss of productivity—and, possibly, their practice’s lack of technical expertise have kept many Pennsylvania physicians from adoption.
The use of health information technology is frequently dependent on high-speed Internet access. Physicians have typically been slow to use Internet access in their practices. A 2006 survey by the Pennsylvania Medical Society showed that 9 percent of Pennsylvania physicians have no Internet access or dial-up access in their practices. Another 28 percent have expensive T-1 lines that have insufficient bandwidth for functions such as telemedicine and transferring digital images. In short, at least 37 percent of Pennsylvania’s physicians—about 11,000—lack high-speed Internet access in their offices. Even in practices that have broadband, access is often limited to a single PC that may not be accessible in the patient treatment area.
Another factor that may inhibit broadband adoption by physicians is the lack of broadband in their homes. We believe the ability to access patients’ health information and send prescriptions electronically from home is very attractive to physicians. We intend to test that assumption in the assessment phase. We plan to leverage our findings to expand residential broadband service.
Broadband access is an essential first step to adoption of electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, Internet-based personal health records, and secure messaging with their patients—all potentially life-saving technologies. The Pennsylvania Medical Society believes that technology is only valuable when it meets a specific need. And, no need is greater than the safety of our patients.
With the $300,000 provided through the broadband outreach grant, the Medical Society begins leading a statewide project advocating the use of broadband network technologies to improve health care in Pennsylvania, especially in rural and underserved areas. The initial phase of this project will have two components. One is to assess and establish a connectivity benchmark among Pennsylvania physicians that is currently unknown. We believe that this information will be valuable to state government, especially the Department of Health, to policymakers, and the Pennsylvania health care community as a whole.
The second component is outreach. An outreach campaign will be developed and implemented in partnership with the community to champion the use of broadband technology. This outreach effort will yield benefits across all regions of the Commonwealth; however, our intent is to place significant emphasis on targeting rural and underserved regions of Pennsylvania.
Our outreach and assessment efforts will begin to raise awareness within the health care community of the possibilities associated with broadband access. Our assessment data will help drive, communicate, and demonstrate the need for physicians’ and hospitals’ broadband connectivity, interconnectivity, and adoption of health information technologies.
We believe this initiative will build a foundation for the strategic implementation of health information technologies that may be the thrust of future Society initiatives. This project will enable physicians to use applications that will yield quality-of-care benefits to thousands of patients and enhance the world-class health care that Pennsylvania physicians deliver to patients every day.
The Medical Society is excited to lead this effort. We believe this initiative will complement our technology vision and result in a more rapid adoption of broadband services by Pennsylvania’s estimated 30,000 actively practicing physicians.
The Pennsylvania Medical Society has had a leading role in many public policy initiatives affecting health care in Pennsylvania and is prepared to lead this effort among physicians. The Medical Society recognizes that broadband has the potential to revolutionize health care delivery in Pennsylvania. But, we also recognize that such efforts work best when other organizations with similar missions are involved and have a stake in the outcome. Additional stakeholders will include both state and local leaders from the health care community, medical technology suppliers, medical schools, public officials, and other organizations, such as technology councils, the hospital association, and the Pennsylvania eHealth Initiative.
The Medical Society expects that this initiative will also impact the communities where we do outreach. Consumers and small businesses may now have broadband services that support Internet-based video and voice communication. However, our major focus is physicians. We see broadband as the critical catalyst for positive change in our doctors’ offices and in our communities.
In conclusion, I would like to thank the legislators who crafted and supported Act 183 for creating an opportunity for Pennsylvania citizens to aggregate their efforts and demand high-speed Internet access in their homes and businesses in all 67 counties. I would also like to thank the Department of Community and Economic Development and the Department of Health for catching our vision of connecting Pennsylvania’s health care providers. We are grateful for the opportunity to take the lead in this important effort.
Thank you.
Last Updated: 8/13/2008