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Date: Friday, March 15, 1996 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact:Sue Bernstein, HRSA,(301) 443-0835
A comprehensive assessment of telemedicine and how to mine its full potential is now available in a new administration-sponsored report. Generated by the nation's key experts, public and private stakeholders, Telemedicine and the National Information Infrastructure (NII): Policy Issues and Recommendations covers a wide range of policy issues and makes explicit recommendations in telemedicine regulation, technological infrastructure, human infrastructure, reimbursement, market opportunities, professional roles, and research and evaluation.
Published Feb. 23 in the spring 1996 edition of Telemedicine Journal, the report is drawn from the deliberations of a public/private-sector conference assembled last May under the auspices of the administration's Joint Working Group on Telemedicine, a component of President Clinton's National Information Infrastructure initiative, or NII.
"This report is very timely, given the many opportunities presented by the Telecommunications Act of 1996," HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala said. "Telemedicine is a very important facet of the NII, because of its potential to provide greater access to quality health care for all Americans, especially those living in rural and remote areas."
Commerce Department Assistant Secretary Larry Irving, who heads the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), noted the report "underscores the need for more demonstration projects and greater evaluation of telemedicine projects. The administration continues to support model telemedicine projects that explore and evaluate the opportunities that telemedicine and the NII present," he added.
Current administration programs designed to exploit the NII for telemedicine include Department of Defense programs in Bosnia, an NTIA-administered telecommunications and information infrastructure assistance program, a distance learning and medical link grant program administered by the Department of Agriculture, and an
evaluative rural telemedicine grant program administered by the HHS Office of Rural Health Policy in the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Such programs are coordinated among the federal agencies by the Joint Working Group on Telemedicine, with the department as the lead agency. "We plan to study this report and its recommendations carefully as we work to overcome barriers to the cost-effective use of telemedicine in this nation," said Dena Puskin, chair of the Joint Working Group and deputy director of the Office of Rural Health Policy.
The springboard conference, the "Second Invitational Consensus Conference on Telemedicine and the National Information Infrastructure," in Augusta, Ga., assembled more than 100 representatives of private industry and business, health care organizations and providers, telemedicine programs, academic institutions, as well as state and federal agencies and departments. Its sponsors were the Clinton administration's Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF), the Commerce Department's NTIA, DOD's Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the department's Office of Rural Health Policy, Health Resources and Services Administration. Coordinating the conference and preparing the report was the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.
Copies of the report will be available from the Office of Rural Health Policy, Health Resources and Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, at 301-443-0835.