An article in the Daily Inter Lake (“Fiber-optic line makes health links”) sings the praises of a new fiber-optic telecommunications network being built by the Kalispell-based Health Information Exchange of Montana, a consortium of Northwest Montana health-care providers.

Sounds great, right? Wrong. The Health Information Exchange is a waste of our money. It substantially duplicates telecommunications network infrastructure already in place — infrastructure built for all of us, not just health-care providers. Such duplication discourages further investment in broadband facilities by private telecom providers. And it puts doctors in the business of telecommunications network operations — a far cry from their core mission of providing health care.

And one other thing: The Health Information Exchange of Montana is funded by the Federal Communications Commission, which arguably lacks the legal authority to fund the construction of health-care networks.

The American Telemedicine Association has filed comments with the FCC stating that “the use of… health-care funds to support broadband infrastructure construction is ill advised.” The Health Information Exchange gets its money from an experimental Rural Health Care Pilot Program established by the FCC in 2006. Fifty health-care projects were funded by the program. Only eight, of which the Health Information Exchange is one, chose to construct network facilities. The FCC finds that the cost per month per health-care provider is nearly 50 percent greater for constructed facilities as opposed to leased or purchased facilities. In Montana, that ratio is 7:1.

A pilot project in Eastern Montana proposes to spend $2 million to reach more health-care providers and consumers, over a far larger, less densely-populated geographic area than the Health Information Exchange, which proposes to spend seven times as much — nearly $14 million — not including millions more that it has requested from the FCC.

Likewise, a pilot project in Colorado told the FCC that it was able to include more providers on its network through purchasing services than if it chose to construct and own its own network. In fact, the FCC itself observes that “projects chose to lease services instead of building networks because [health-care providers] did not want to own or manage the networks and could more easily obtain needed broadband without owning the facilities or incurring administrative and other costs associated with network ownership.”

Health Information Exchange of Montana argues that broadband facilities are unavailable for the health-care providers on its network. However, the providers on the network have had at least one, if not multiple, broadband facilities available to them from companies that actually are in the business of providing telecommunications services.

Even if the claims were accurate, it is far more cost effective to enter into long-term service agreements than to reinvent the mouse trap with redundant, expensive infrastructure. Such arrangements, the FCC adds, “also may provide vendors the incentive to deploy broadband connections where they do not exist, or to upgrade current facilities to higher bandwidths.”

The Universal Service Administrative Company, which administers the funds for this program comments that “projects choosing to lease services cite several reasons for that choice, including that [health-care providers’] core competencies do not include owning or managing communications networks, that [they] can obtain the needed broadband without owning the facilities themselves, and that the administrative and other costs associated with broadband network ownership are too great.”

I’d feel a lot better if health-care providers concentrated on providing health care.

Feiss, of Helena, is the general manager of the Montana Telecommunications Association.