A number of posts here have emphasized the importance of policies that promote (or at least avoid deterring) health care innovation.
CLI's interests extend far beyond health care -- to areas of broadband and telecom, intellectual property, software, innovation (collaborative and proprietary). And one of our fundamental points is that all of these interests are connected.
See, for example, this note by Anoop Gupta, Microsoft VP for Technology Policy & Strategy, on Moving a National Broadband Plan Forward:
Today, broadband is foundational for driving innovation and
productivity across all economic sectors, including energy, education,
healthcare, and e-government.
For example, at Microsoft we envision a connected health ecosystem
that enables predictive, preventive, and personalized care. Telehealth
technologies can be used to remotely monitor patients, facilitate
collaboration between medical professionals, exchange medical data and
images, and instantaneously provide efficient emergency service to
remote areas. We see medical research increasingly benefiting from the
HUGE amounts of patient and genomics data for drug discovery and
personalized medicine.
He links to a letter recording a tele-meeting with FCC Chairman Genechowski and CEOs John Chambers (Cisco); Steve Ballmer (Microsoft); Jeffrey lmmelt (GE); and Steve Hemsley (UnitedHeath) at which the sectoral breadth of the broadband plan was emphasized.
To talk of "broadband policy" is misleading. You can't think effectively about broadband policy as a pure abstraction. You also need to think health care policy, education, and energy.
It works in reverse, too, in that thinking about these substantive areas requires consideration of the capabilities of broadband.
The FCC, in developing a broadband policy, is also developing health care policy, and energy policy,a nd so on. Example: Net neutrality, in its strong form of uniform treatment of all bits, whether related to the latest P2P piracy or on-line surgery, would do a lot to prevent innovation in medical services.
