Medhealth Review

5G Powered Healthcare: What to Expect?

As the utilization of 5G in advanced healthcare increases, mostly in collaboration with technological advancements in IoT or Artificial Intelligence, AR/VR, an innovative and connected healthcare ecosystem will emerge. In fact, the ever-increasing use of 5G has also paved the way for enhanced demand for the aforementioned services.

5G networks have proven their ability to transform or enhance the current healthcare system which is under tremendous pressure to deliver amidst the limitations imposed by the novel coronavirus.

For example, telemedicine has surfaced as a practical solution in the covid-hit era where avoiding exposure is of paramount importance. 

Ensuring quality telemedicine services requires the healthcare system to go beyond traditional norms. The requirement is for a highly advanced network that ensures uninterrupted support in real-time without slowing down the facility network. When existing infrastructure is upgraded with something like 5G, the result would be a real-time and uninterrupted transfer of documents, videos, images, and other information.

Access to real-time data is critical especially during emergency medical situations that demand faster and insightful decisions and actions to save lives. 

Also, patients, especially from rural areas or areas wherein medical facility is not immediately or adequately available can expect faster treatment and access to specialist medical professionals otherwise not available. Also, from a medical services point of view, the doctors and other staff would be able to collaborate in a much better manner.

The 5G technology can enhance a medical professional’s scope in extending less invasive and innovative treatments.

However, for any organization or individual services to be able to leverage the complete potential of 5G in healthcare technologies, ensuring data privacy and network security is important. 

5G technology comes with increased capacity and lower latency. This enables healthcare providers to extend remote monitoring into a wider patient base. Providers are assured of reception of real-time data to extend the care patients expect and need.  

According to experts, 5G-powered devices can suddenly bring in a new healthcare approach, which is often termed as 4P, the term 4P deals with the following capabilities, advanced healthcare that is predictive, preventative, personalized, and lastly, participatory.

The healthcare industry creates huge amounts of information. Even the data from a single patient can be around hundreds of gbs each and every day. These may include patient clinical records, large information files, image files from PET, CAT, and MRI scans. 

The healthcare space produces massive amounts of data. A single patient can generate hundreds of gigabytes of data each day, from patient medical records to the large image files created by MRI, CAT, or PET scans.

The change to 5G also implies a long-term solution to the ever-increasing requirement for bandwidth. 

North America was at the top in 2019 among the countries having a 5G-empowered healthcare market. The dominance is likely to go beyond the current year as well. 

All in all, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the imminent years might witness 5G transforming as a potential technology that can be the differentiating aspect between life and death. 

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