Hospitals Press FCC to Expand Health Care on the Airwaves

摘要

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is undertaking a review of its spectrum policies to determine how it can support expanded telehealth wireless applications. Hospitals are pushing the FCC hard to do so for a number of reasons. Added wireless capacity would expand connectivity for small rural health facilities and give them access to specialists in big cities, helping to keep health care costs low for patients and to improve care. But the bigger prize is opening up the world of in-home health monitoring as fifth-generation (5G) service enables the so-called "Internet of things" (IoT)-an ever-evolving term the Oxford Living Dictionary defines as "the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data." A third imperative is to add spectrum to prevent interference with inpatient monitoring of wireless medical devices because of the multitude of devices using the 1.4-GHz band available for wireless medical telemetry service (WMTS).