SITUATION OVERVIEW

The arrival of 5G portends a new wave of innovation and digital transformation across many industries, fueled by the ability to manage more data in real time to drive intelligent, sometimes autonomous decision making. Perhaps there is no industry more suited to directly benefit across all three of 5G’s performance enhancements (speed, latency, and density) than healthcare. The complexity, interdependencies, and sheer number of systems in the human body generates an enormous amount of data, any number of which may provide insights about a patient’s condition and potential treatment options. Capturing, transporting, and analyzing that amount of data (think a digital twin for the patient) requires an extraordinary amount of bandwidth and data rates. Precisely what 5G was designed to do, particularly when the patient may require treatment outside the boundaries of a medical facility. An ever-increasing number of diagnostic systems and sensors for monitoring a patient’s health — both bedside and in remote settings — threaten to overwhelm existing wireless connectivity options, and wired options present an unpalatable restriction on a patient’s mobility. 5G solves for that by enabling a massive increase in the number of simultaneous supported connections. Certainly, and perhaps most importantly, faster, potentially automated responses to changes in patient’s physical condition, enabled by 5G’s lower latency, can save lives.

Despite the potential for 5G to impact medical diagnosis and treatment, as well as deliver operational efficiency, it is hardly a panacea for all of healthcare’s pain points. 5G’s integration in healthcare use cases needs to be deliberate and judicious. Deploying 5G indiscriminately throughout the organization and patient experience will unnecessarily add costs to 5G deployment, mute the benefits, and increase the risk the project could be viewed negatively.

While adopting 5G in healthcare can appear to be a dauntingly complex initiative, healthcare organizations are demonstrating a willingness to commit financial and operational resources to begin their 5G journey. More than a third of respondents to IDC’s U.S. Enterprise Mobility Decision Maker Survey: Devices indicated that their organization had already purchased and deployed some 5G devices. At the same time, there is a lot of pragmatism for that investment, given competing priorities such as COVID-19. As a result, more than 20% of healthcare organizations either have no 5G deployment plans or do not foresee 5G investment for another couple of years.

To read full download the whitepaper:

Making the Case for 5G in Healthcare

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