What You Should Know:
– The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) has introduced an enhanced Digital Infrastructure Score, a data-driven tool designed to measure how well U.S. communities are equipped for digital access.
– The new benchmarking tool provides a comprehensive review of the elements needed for digital health solutions, especially as physical access to healthcare changes.
What the Digital Infrastructure Score Measures
The ATA’s new tool and its accompanying mapping interface highlight crucial infrastructure variables:
- Broadband access
- Internet speeds
- Device availability
- Affordability
These variables are assigned weights that reflect the real-world adoption of virtual care and digital health services. The platform features a heatmap interface that displays differences by ZIP code or county, allowing users to drill down and identify which factors impact scores. This detailed view can help with analysis, grant applications, or policy planning.
Digital Infrastructure Score Benefits for Healthcare Stakeholders
The ATA’s Digital Infrastructure Score is a valuable resource for a wide range of stakeholders, including hospital systems, health plan executives, public health administrators, and policymakers. The tool helps them make more precise investments, build stronger patient engagement, and improve health equity outcomes and access.
The tool is particularly useful for rural communities and states, as it can help them plan for health transformation by:
- Identifying a community’s readiness to adopt virtual care and digital health services.
- Guiding necessary broadband investments.
- Supporting policy evaluation and funding proposals with credible data.
- Enabling multi-sector collaboration using a shared evidence base.
“By building on the original frameworks developed by our CEO advisory group, we were able to incorporate additional data sets, develop enhanced data visualization tools, and improve the design interface and user experience for these tools,” said Ann Mond Johnson, CEO of the ATA. “Our Digital Infrastructure Score and Mapping tool makes digital readiness visible and empowers health, policy, and community leaders to make smarter, more informed decisions to for the deployment of digital health services.
The ATA received a grant from the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) to enhance its Digital Infrastructure Score (DIS) and mapping tools.
