BANGOR — The New England Telehealth Consortium is celebrating its 10th anniversary of building, operating, and maintaining a state-of-the-art broadband and telemedicine infrastructure for more than 320 of hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers throughout rural areas in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Based in Bangor, NETC is a non-profit consortium of research, academic, public, and private healthcare organizations dedicated to telehealth. NETC is governed by a 20-member board of directors representing healthcare providers across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
NETC was launched to help hospitals, clinics, and other medical providers in the region access funds from the Rural Health Care Pilot Program. The Federal Communications Commission created this program to help spark the development of advanced telecommunications systems for rural medical providers by subsidizing up to 85 percent of buildout costs.
Since 2012, NETC has enabled more than 1,200 healthcare providers to access more than $200 million from the RHCPP, as well as its successor program, the Healthcare Connect Fund, which the FCC created to support the continued development of broadband for non-profit health care providers.
In addition to helping millions of people living in rural areas to access telehealth services, the new infrastructure has created more reliable and secure data networks for rural hospitals and clinics; it has allowed providers to access specialists at hospitals in large urban areas and share high-res images such as MRI scans. What’s more, it has also reduced costs for the rural hospitals and clinics, which would otherwise have had to build broadband networks on their own, which in many cases, would have been prohibitively expensive.
“The development of this network has meant that scores of people living in rural areas have been able to access life-saving medical care that was previously out of reach,” said Jim Rogers, president of ProInfoNet, the company retained by NETC to manage the implementation and operation of the NETC network. “We have created a private sustainable, quality broadband network for healthcare providers that has greatly improved their capability and efficiency, while saving millions of dollars.”
By 2025, NETC aims to have a total of 1,500 medical facilities as part of the New England network.
Brian Thibeau, president of the NETC Board of Directors, added that as technology continues to evolve, and new sources of federal funding become available, NETC will continue to work to find ways to improve the delivery of healthcare in rural areas. “We are proud of doing this critical work to help people in rural areas get the care they need. There is still so much important work to be done to advance telecommunications in the healthcare arena.”
The nonprofit New England Telehealth Consortium, or NETC, works with hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers throughout the New England states, to develop advanced telecommunications and broadband networks, and access federal subsidies available to offset development costs. NETC manages all aspects of design, buildout, and implementation.
