California Telehealth Network

Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 04:17

The CTN is the product of an unprecedented statewide coalition of healthcare, technology, government, and other stakeholders, that drafted a proposal in spring 2007 to the Federal Communications Commission. Under the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program – with the goal of significantly increasing access to acute, primary and preventive health care in rural America – the FCC will provide California with up to $22.1 million over three years. Additional funds for the CTN have been provided by the California Emerging Technology Fund, and UnitedHealth/PacifiCare.

The CTN project intends to leverage and build upon California’s historic and recent investments in telehealth. In recent years, a number of exciting initiatives have been launched in California to advance the use of telecommunications and health care technology. Significant among these are Governor Schwarzenegger’s Health Information Technology (HIT) Executive Order (S-12-06, signed July 2006), which allocated $240 million to achieve full information exchange between health care providers and stakeholders within ten years, and his Broadband Executive Order (S-23-06, signed November 2006), which established a broadband task force to promote broadband access and usage. Also important are efforts of the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF), California’s Telemedicine & eHealth Center’s regional eHealth networks, the California Teleconnect Fund (administered by the California Public Utilities Commission), and the University of California’s Proposition 1D funding.

The University of California was awarded a $22.1 million project from the Federal Communications Commission and a $3.6 million grant from the California Emerging Technology Fund to develop the California Telehealth Network (CTN). The CTN vision is to provide managed, sustainable, medical grade broadband access to community anchor institutions throughout California. These institutions, connected together through a high speed network to academic centers, data centers, application service providers and insurers, will form the basis for a technology enabled health care system.

The benefits of membership in the CTN are that CTN will serve as an “honest broker” to connect sites with value-added health services such as clinical consultants; access to a suite of donated and commercial services available to network members including patient education, professional continuing education for the academic health centers, hosted electronic health records through commercial application service providers; and the opportunity to participate in medical research opportunities.

Project Partners

The California Telehealth Network is the product of an unprecedented coalition of stakeholders. This large and diverse group of partners will work together to create new telecommunications infrastructure, eventually allowing California’s rural communities to access a broad range of technology-enhanced services to improve the quality of health care services. Detailed listing of Project Partners and Roles (pdf)