“If I can do that, that would be a very healing experience,” he said. “Well, repealing net neutrality may screw that up. They may charge those patients a zillion dollars for the necessary bandwidth I need to communicate and to do my job better.”
Cyber protection, competition
Another hurdle to telemedicine if net neutrality is repealed involves encryption. Everything that is transmitted through telemedicine portals has tomust be encrypted to meet HIPAA laws.
“Say an ISP decides they no longer want encrypted traffic to go across their network because they want visibility into everything that goes across their line. At that point we’re just hoping that they’re going to continue to pass that traffic,” Greg Hall, IT director for the Center for Telehealth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told Healio.com. “If they decide they don't want to or want us to pay them additional fees to have the traffic that is encrypted then suddenly we’re stuck. They could very easily block it all and we can no longer do a telehealth encounter because we can’t pass our traffic over our networks. Our business is completely stopped because one ISP somewhere on the chain has decided that they don't like that kind of traffic.”
Even if major ISP providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Sprint continue to operate under the guidelines of net neutrality and do not restrict access, there still could be hurdles to telemedicine, Hall said.
“You have a small rural ISP that decides, ‘Hey, no we don’t want to play all those games, we want to charge a certain fee for certain traffic’ and say that happens to be the video traffic that we push across the internet at some point. All of the sudden, that small little provider, just because we happen to pass some traffic across their network, could very easily cripple access at that point.
“The main concern is not even just, ‘Hey, our bill comes from AT&T every month.’ It doesn't always just go over AT&T lines, so we have to worry about every ISP that our traffic happens to go across to get from one location to another.”