Health Information Technology

Reps Walkinshaw (D-VA) and Buddy Carter (R-GA) introduced bipartisan legislation to replace fragmented federal reporting with reliable annual data showing who Medicare telehealth is reaching, where access barriers remain, how patients are faring, and where taxpayer dollars may be at risk. The Telehealth Reporting and Transparency Act of 2026 would require the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to report annually on telehealth utilization, patient access, available health outcomes, provider participation, and program integrity. The annual report would include:

Rep Michael McCaul (R-TX)—founder and co-chair of the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus—introduced the 

Veneeth Iyengar, executive director of ConnectLA, has been appointed to the Louisiana Rural Health Transformation Program Advisory Council by Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA). The advisory council was created as a result of Gov. Landry’s executive order signed in April, establishing the Office of Rural Health Transformation and Sustainability within the Louisiana Department of Health, advancing efforts to strengthen health care access and outcomes for rural communities across the state.

The recent growth in the use of telehealth has facilitated new and expanded access to care for patients, while also raising questions for healthcare providers about laws and regulations regarding payment, use, and delivery of services. This issue brief is the third in a series that aims to address broadband barriers in healthcare, with the first brief exploring why broadband is a ‘super’ social determinant of health and the second brief assessing funding opportunities to improve access to care via broadband-enabled technologies.

Funding for federal programs supporting broadband infrastructure and digital inclusion has tightened over the last year. With the Affordable Connectivity Program winding down in April 2024, the termination of Digital Equity Act grants in May 2025, and changes to the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, the digital divide could widen, leaving millions disconnected from essential services that rely on internet access, including healthcare.

This publication that sets out a new financial logic for sustaining digital adoption programs in the United States, arguing that digital adoption programs are essential services that create measurable economic value that benefits a range of sectors.

Finding sustainable, low-cost ways to care for the elderly population is a problem Texas is all too familiar with and Japan, home to the world’s largest over-65 population at 36 million, is beating Texas in solving. Chronic workforce shortages along with rising costs to care for a growing older population have prompted Japan—from companies to local governments—to heavily invest in technology to make it easier for family members to remotely monitor the elderly.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and the North Carolina Department of Information Technology announced three new programs to improve the digital infrastructure of rural health care through new digital solutions and tools.

The Universal Service Administrative Company’s (USAC’s) estimated total Rural Health Care (RHC) Program demand for Funding Year 2026 is $911.25 million, including the gross demand estimate of $882.19 million for the Telecommunications (Telecom) and Healthcare Connect Fund (HCF) Programs and the projected USAC administrative expenses of $29.06 million.

Fifty billion dollars is now flowing to states to transform rural healthcare. For communities that have endured decades of hospital closures, provider shortages, and dwindling options, that money is welcome and long overdue. But every dollar of it is assuming patients and their caregivers can navigate digital systems—and a lot of them can’t. The Rural Health Transformation Program, authorized under P.L. 119-21, is designed to modernize care delivery through telehealth expansion, remote monitoring, digital patient portals, and data-sharing infrastructure. These are good investments.