Access to broadband holding back modern medicine
By Andrew Brown, Business Reporter for the Gazette-Mail
PARSONS â The health clinic is set in a secluded valley along the Cheat River, surrounded by steep, wooded hills that rise up in every direction.
Like many rural health providers in West Virginia, the St. George Medical Clinic is geographically isolated from larger, urban hospital centers and the health specialists they employ.
But the clinic's remoteness and physical isolation has recently been negated by 12 miles of fiber-optic line that now provides the rural healthcare center with a high-speed broadband connection, something that has quickly become a requisite for modern health care services.
With the help of funding from the Federal Communications Commission and assistance from TeleQuality Communications, a broadband provider that specializes in connecting rural healthcare centers, the St. George Medical Clinic can now utilize modern medical technology that has become commonplace for health providers in other parts of the country.
The new 45-megabit broadband connection means the clinic's patients can benefit now from the sharing of large digital medical records and, in the future, from telemedicine consultations with doctors in other parts of the state or country.
Prior to installing the fiber optic line, Paul Wamsley, the clinic's director, said his staff had to work with a DSL connection that only provided speeds of one to three megabits per second.
READ REST OF STORY Access to broadband holding back modern medicine By Andrew Brown, Business Reporter for the Gazette-Mail
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