Editor’s note: On the fourth day of the 12 Days of Broadband, MCNC explores the Healthcare Connect Fund announced in 2013, and how it’s helping to advance health care networks across the country, including the North Carolina TeleHealth Network.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) kicked off 2013 by unveiling a new $400 million fund to support the deployment of broadband-enabled health care technologies called the Healthcare Connect Fund (HCF).

The new HCF advances and solidifies the FCC’s pilot work to further widen telemedicine networks, boost access to specialists for patients who don’t live near major hospital centers, and to improve the overall quality of health and care for all citizens. The new HCF also allows thousands of new providers to share in the benefits of connectivity while dramatically cutting costs for eligible health care sites.

The FCC launched its Rural Health Care Pilot Program in 2006 to learn how to effectively support broadband health care networks, now funding 50 active pilots nationwide including the North Carolina TeleHealth Network – read new case study: Broadband brings life to North Carolina TeleHealth Network.

The NCTN is a dedicated network for public and non-profit health care providers leveraging both the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) and the N.C. Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) infrastructure to provide high-capacity, reliable and cost-efficient network services.

The NCTN began in 2007 and is coordinated through the Cabarrus Health Alliance (CHA) and subsidized through the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program (RHCPP). To date, the NCTN has been a $14.2 million program, of which 85 percent has been provided by the FCC as discounts through the competitively-funded RHCPP.

There are three phases of the NCTN (the NCTN-PH phase for public health, free clinics and some community health centers; the NCTN-H phase for non-profit hospitals; and the NCTN Extension phase, which focuses on broadening services for many existing NCTN health care sites as well as adding new sites). A fourth phase is on the immediate horizon, which will leverage the HCF announced in January.

Since inception, the NCTN has grown to 120 total sites in North Carolina. It is expected that about 125 sites will be in operation by early 2014, all of which have indicated an interest in subscribing to the new and more permanent NCTN Healthcare Connect Fund phase (NCTN-HCF) soon to begin. Another 700 health care sites and providers in North Carolina also have presented initial information as a first step towards subscribing to the new NCTN-HCF.

Dave Kirby, president of Kirby Management Consulting and NCTN project manager, explained earlier this year that the new HCF provides large discounts for public and non-profit health care providers for a variety of broadband services and is a permanent extension of the pilot program that the NCTN has successfully worked through to provide discounts to current subscribers.

“Broadband demands are likely to grow over the next several years as more health care providers become more dependent on their broadband services for clinical and other business operations,” said Kirby.

Today’s health care environment increasingly depends on electronic connections that assure high-quality care is provided efficiently, effectively, and at an acceptable cost. Accessing remote experts on a moment’s notice, sharing information among a patient’s physicians quickly and easily, keeping parents up to date on the details of their child’s doctor visits, and providing continuing education to health care providers all depend on highly-reliable, cost-effective, and very fast broadband connections.

Meeting this challenge at an affordable cost for North Carolina’s public health agencies, hospitals, and other public and non-profit health care providers is the primary mission of the NCTN.

“We are hopeful that this new program will allow the NCTN to provide the vast majority of public and non-profit health care providers the affordable broadband services that meet their current and emerging needs to use networked health IT applications to improve care and lower costs,” added Kirby.

MCNC offered NCREN as a broadband network foundation to be utilized in the transformation of health care delivery in North Carolina. The completion of the three-year, $144 million expansion of NCREN through the Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative in 2013 further boosts the capabilities and bandwidth for the NCTN as well as lowering costs.

“We are pleased to see this network coming alive now, and expect it to help many health care providers meet the new challenges in using information systems to support health and care, especially for non-profit and rural providers,” said Dr. William F. Pilkington, CEO and Director of Public Health at Cabarrus Health Alliance. “The Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative provides the NCTN with the essential core resource needed to stitch these providers together into a statewide broadband network to support the current and future digital medicine needs in North Carolina.”

According to the FCC, broadband has the power to improve the quality of care for patients while saving billions of dollars across the system.

The FCC started accepting applications for the new HCF over the summer. Those eligible to apply include public or not-for-profit hospitals, rural health clinics, community health centers, health centers serving migrants, community mental health centers, local health departments or agencies, post-secondary educational institutions/teaching hospitals/medical schools, or a consortia of the above. Non-rural health care providers may participate as part of consortia, but the consortia must remain majority rural.