Over the past year the hype around 5G networks has increased rapidly. Telecommunications companies are promising much greater networking speed and other attributes that they claim will greatly improve customer entertainment and work experiences.
While the full implementation of 5G networks is still years away from reality, 5G’s potential deserves our serious attention. The technology could revolutionize entire industries because of its ability to support greatly increased data transmission speeds. The promise of 5G will be further enhanced when combined with artificial intelligence applications, greater access to more and different types of data, and mobile edge computing.
Healthcare is one of the industries that will be most directly impacted by 5G networks. 5G will support the growth and increased effectiveness of telehealth, greatly enhance mobile healthcare applications, and significantly expand access to data and images. The sources of this expanded information flow will include medical devices and other items enabled by the Internet of Things. 5G networks will also further accelerate the development of consumer-driven healthcare, including healthcare-specific augmented reality, imaging, and rapid transmission of huge amounts of unstructured data.
While it will take some time for devices, phones, and infrastructures to become fully 5G-enabled, planning for how healthcare policies, regulations, business, technical, and security operations will change needs to happen now.
From a policy and business perspective, we need to begin to develop the use cases, policy changes, and IT platform modifications that will be needed to support the 5G transformation. Many questions will come to mind. How will criteria for defining protected health information change? What changes will need to occur for security risk assessments? What will be the impacts on rural healthcare in areas that don’t even have broadband yet? What changes will be needed with healthcare payment policies when 5G enables mobile medical tests to become ubiquitous? Are legislative changes needed at the Federal and/or state levels?
Technologists, policy and business leaders and organizations must begin now to prepare and organize for the ramifications. If we are not intentional at this moment of change, the true promise of healthcare transformation that 5G networks can bring may be limited or never fully realized.