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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report understand that employees can be productive working from home, while saving the company from operating expensive office space. Telemedicine is likely going to become a routine way to connect with doctors for visits that don't require a physical examination. Video chat has now become a routine way for people to communicate. Improved Medical Care. We know that telemedicine needs a high-quality upload connection. Telemedicine is likely to become a routine facet of healthcare. Telemedicine is using broadband to connect patients to doctors over the Internet. Patients can talk to doctors using a video connection if the home has adequate broadband. Before the pandemic one of the most common uses for telemedicine was allowing patients able to talk to specialists in distant locations. Another common use has been for holding regular non-intrusive visits for things like counseling so that patients can make a scheduled appointment without major disruption to a work schedule. A growing area of telemedicine is the use of medical telemetry devices, which can monitor patients after they've had medical procedures. For example, Saint Vincent Health System in Erie, Pennsylvania has been using these technologies and has lowered readmission rates of patients after surgery by 44%. CoBank recently sponsored a trial in Georgia for rural diabetes patients and showed a significant improvement for patients who could be monitored daily and who could communicate easily with doctors. Telemedicine usage soared during the pandemic. During March and April of 2020, the billings for telemedicine were almost $4 billion, compared to only $60 million for the same two months in 2019. It's going to be interesting to see the level of telemedicine after the end of the pandemic. There was a recent article about the topic in Forbes that postulates that the future of telemedicine will be determined by a combination of the acceptance by doctors and insurance companies. Many doctors have now had a taste of the technology. It seems likely that the telemedicine platforms in place now will get a lot of feedback from doctors and will improve in the next generation of software upgrades. The recent experience with telemedicine is going to make a lot of doctor's look harder at their broadband provider. Like most of us, a doctor's office likely relied a lot more in the past on download speed rather than upload speed. It's likely that doctor offices making simultaneous telemedicine visits are unhappy with cable modem service. Doctors will join the chorus of those advocating for faster broadband speeds—particularly upload speeds. Improved Education. It's likely after the pandemic that a lot of schoolwork will continue to be offered online. Already before the pandemic, 37% of all graduate degrees contained a significant portion of the coursework online. Fiber is one of the only technologies that allows busy households with multiple family members to easily pursue online schoolwork or training. Digital Divide/Affordability. In every city there are households that can't afford broadband. The residential survey showed that 15% of the homes in the city don't have a landline broadband connection today. It's likely that for most of these homes the primary issue is affordability. A municipal fiber network, or a network built in partnership with an ISP can find ways to assist low- income homes. Cities understand that the community will be stronger if everybody is connected to the Internet. That will be more important in the future as cities start implementing smart city technology to provide better digital access to city services. Page 82