Net Neutrality advocates equal treatment for all data on the internet regardless of a website, content, application or platform and its supporters demand that Government and internet service providers should charge an equal price for all internet data without discrimination on any basis. There is a great uproar on the issue. People are strongly protesting against the concept of biased internet and TRAI has already received over 8 lakhs petition in favor of Net Neutrality. But some companies like Airtel, Facebook, etc are looking for some flexibility in this matter.
Healthcare industry is moving towards digitalization to various online services such as Telemedicine, Cloud-based systems, Medical apps, Electronic medical Records, etc in such situation any move on Net Neutrality will certainly affect Healthcare services.
The Healthcare sector is divided into two groups on the issue of Net Neutrality while many healthcare organizations did not take any clear stand on it. The first group says that Hospitals and Medical facilities should have fast lane internet service as it would render patients with better services and would be life-saving in emergency medical situations. The other group fears that different payment charges for accessing the web would be harmful to independent medical practitioners and larger players of the industry would get the benefit. They also claim that Net Neutrality will benefit remote patient monitoring.
Medical establishments which have moved to cloud computing system are totally depending on broadband internet service provider to access information and provide treatment to patients. If internet services are classified into slow/fast lanes, they will have to pay more for quality service or have to cope up with poor internet performance.
There is no doubt that high-speed internet service is critical for Medical Services, especially for videos based services, but revised internet rates would cast extra burden and will increase the health care cost. On 26 February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted Open Internet Rules which prohibits Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking or creating fast/slow lanes for lawful content on the internet. Three health care trade groups (Wireless-Life Sciences Alliances, Mhealth Regulatory Coalition, and Health IT Now Collation) requested FCC not to apply these rules to mobile broadband services.
Barack Obama the US President has urged FCC earlier to implement “Strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality” however on healthcare he looked soft when he said “can have clear, monitored exceptions for reasonable network management and for specialized services such as dedicated, mission-critical networks serving as a hospital.