Kaiser Family Foundation

Tory Starr is worried about the people who get medical care at Open Door Community Health Centers along California’s North Coast. “They’re the folks that work at restaurants. They’re the teacher’s aides,” said Starr, a registered nurse who became Open Door’s chief executive more than six years ago. Those patients, he said, are “really the heart and soul of rural America.” He said if his remote health centers don’t get a share of the billions of dollars Congress earmarked to transform health care in rural America, patients may soon lose services.

The conventional wisdom used to be that seniors would be slow to adopt new digital health technologies. A lot has changed, according to results from the first of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s survey series on the public and seniors' use of and appetite for digital health technology. Maybe COVID forced America’s seniors to get on a steep tech learning curve. Maybe their kids have educated them. Or maybe seniors have simply aged into tech or adapted to new technologies to survive, as they’ve had to do to deal with their cell phone company and streaming service—what choice do they have?

Years of Republican and Democratic administrations have tried to fix the nation’s broadband woes, through flawed attempts.

The Greene County (AL) Health System, with only three doctors, has no intensive care unit or surgical services.

Patients across the rural South, Appalachia, and remote West are most often unable to make a video call to their doctor or log into their patient portals. Both are essential ways to participate in the U.S. medical system. In 2025, more than $42 billion allocated in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expected to begin flowing to states as part of a national “Internet for All” initiative launched by the Biden administration.