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A new emerging healthcare ecosystem with 5G

Taking India’s digital story to another milestone, the 5G services in India were launched on October 1, 2022 by the Hon’ble Prime Minister. The induction of 5G technology unlocks enormous possibilities for transformation in crucial sectors like agriculture, education, transport, and most importantly healthcare. This new avenue gives an opportunity for India’s digital infrastructure to be more resilient and provide unique and innovative solutions to solve existing challenges, create employment, and unfold socio-economic benefits.

The 5G is expected to be about 10× faster than the 4G and is supposed to provide a greater degree of security, network flexibility, reduced energy consumption, and lower ping rate. This ultra-high speed internet is anticipated to be the key enabler in affecting many aspects of life and provide an opportunity for innovations in quality and access to healthcare. Some examples that appear to be prudent scenarios for 5G healthcare use cases in order to build digital health-enabled ecosystem are discussed below:

Remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring can be a driver for efficient delivery of healthcare services and chronic disease management. 5G provides an opportunity for remote patient monitoring to happen at scale due to the advantages of increased capacity of the number of connected devices and greater reliability and security of services. This will also positively influence the home healthcare medical devices segment.

Teleconsultations. Two-way video consultations between a patient and a healthcare professional can be extremely useful in routine check-ups, not requiring physical procedures, rehabilitation sessions, and follow ups, thereby reducing unnecessary patient load at facilities and reducing the time and travel burdens for the patient. Video-enabled calls can also serve as an opportunity to improve patient compliance and adherence to medication regime. The advantages of mobility, higher bandwidth, increased reliability, and security of 5G will be useful in enabling high-definition virtual consultations to happen at scale.

Improved emergency care through connected ambulances. The concept of a connected ambulance requires the ambulance and its crew to be equipped to collect and transfer patient information through sensors, wearables, and HD video engagement to the hospital/facility, while the patient is being transported. This would allow the hospital to be informed and prepared to receive the patient before they arrive and result in overall improvement in patient outcomes and create tremendous efficiencies in emergency services. The higher bandwidth, lower latency, and network slicing capabilities of 5G can play an important role in emergency care where split-second decisions have a significant impact on patient outcomes.

Remote surgery support. Many hospitals now have experts in specific surgical fields supporting the surgical team during surgeries via video and audio connections. With increasing advances in the field of medicine, more and more surgeries now depend on technology. For instance, a small surgical microscope can clearly reveal the area to be operated upon. 5G can provide an opportunity to live stream the same information in real time to a supporting expert team situated elsewhere. Another opportunity could utilize 5G-enabled augmented reality/virtual reality headsets that allow an expert to watch a surgery taking place in real time and guiding the in-house surgeon based on their experience.

With the launch of 5G, the country is now at an inflection point to steadfast toward changing the face of healthcare. The super speed and robustness of 5G are anticipated to accelerate the development of tele-health services, support IoT (Internet of Things) applications, and strengthen the digital infrastructure. This will consequently propel growth in the areas of remote and home healthcare, wearables, and devices segments and robotic surgery assistance.

Views expressed are personal. 

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