Santa Cruz Harbor by Stephen Hosmer
Health care is one of the most vital services for any community. Modern medicine is increasingly digital, networked, and spread across diverse locations. Medical organizations are more and more dependent on the bandwidth necessary to communicating and collaborating. The global community of medical researchers depends on access to prior work and peer review to advance the technologies of medicine.
For their part, patients increasingly have access to online records, diagnostic tools, and crowd-sourced communities of patients. They’re connected by smart-phones for monitoring their conditions like diabetes and blood pressure.
Health care in Santa Cruz works to provide services to upwards of 250,000 county residents, mostly through the professional networks of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Dominican Hospital. Our health organizations not only provide care to the insured population but they also grow funds to extend care to our poor and uninsured. These providers are heavily networked with Stanford Medical, UCSF, Santa Clara Valley Hospital Network, the Regional Medical Center of San Jose, and many others. Local providers depend on internet access to share records, manage patient care across facilities, find payment assistance for the uninsured, and handle patient transfers. Santa Cruz residents will get the best medical care only with increased bandwidth.
Our community will continue to face challenges as medicine and health care grow more dependent on network access and bandwidth. Telemedicine will be increasingly commonplace, from video conference house calls to remote surgical procedures. Our personal devices and appliances will play larger roles in measuring the statistics of our daily lifestyle habits, giving us feedback and guidelines for health and sharing that information with our doctors and, probably, our insurers as well. Even emergency services like ambulances will capture more detailed information about traffics patterns and congestion to determine the most optimal routes to provide assistance while rendering advanced on-site treatment with remote operators. All of these emerging elements of social health care are both enabled by network access and limited by bandwidth constrictions.
For Santa Cruz to maintain the high quality of health care necessary for the well-being of our community it will be imperative that we focus on the network constraints impacting medical services. A fiber build-out will allow us to maximize care and more fully participate in the regional and global community of medical development and treatment.
Chris Arkenberg is a technologist, forecaster, and strategist. He currently sits on the advisory board for 
