Technology can strengthen the doctor/patient relationship and provide information to patients that informs healthcare decision making. Some of the trends that are shaping that experience are visible now. Patients—especially Millennials—are interested in controlling their experience and investing in their digital health journey via omni-channel tools: chat, text, e-mail, apps, voice, telehealth, and web. They’re the first-wave consumers of a Transcendent Customer Experience that brings customers what they want, when and where they want it.

What’s important for digital brand owners to consider is whether their current omni-channel tools are working as intended for customers: Are patients achieving their goals online? Where do they encounter obstacles? How does that experience reflect on the brand, customer satisfaction, and health outcomes? According to a report by Acquia, 80 percent of customers think technology should make their experiences with brands more valuable.

Dr Michelle Jimerson (MD, MPH), of Yampa Valley Medical Associates in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, tells us, “The journey to accessing care often begins with patients researching symptoms online, followed by seeking nearby healthcare providers, reading reviews and making appointments. The care process continues in a patient portal with access to test results, prescriptions, health records and more.”

The most common use of technology for healthcare today is searching symptoms on the internet. Along with its popularity comes a host of issues about privacy, advertising, and the reliability of speculative, socially-shared information. Despite those risks, free and instant access to health information holds huge appeal to consumers. Other examples of consumer health tools include:

• Walgreens digital marketplace Find Care offers customers a variety of healthcare services online: lab tests, weight loss support, sleep solutions, COVID-19 testing, and virtual consults.
• Apps that promise symptom triaging supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and connect patients with potential service providers via texting are available now from insurers like Anthem.

Recent events have driven rapid, evolutionary change from healthcare IT:

• Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania saw COVID-19 drive a 500 percent increase in telehealth visits, and a sudden, unplanned increase of 13, 000 employees working remotely.
• 2,000 DNA sequences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai totaled 100 terabytes of data.

According to Dr. Jimerson five trends are beginning to shape the digital patient journey:

1. Visibility and sharing of electronic health records. The HIPAA-mandated shift to electronic health records has empowered caregivers to share patient history, records, test results, imagery, and notes digitally—if they are on the same platform (i.e., Epic, Cerner, GE, CoreCloud, AthenaHealth, eClinicalWorks, Nextgen, Allscripts). Similarly, patients can now track their own health history with detailed records through self-service patient portals. That visibility expands treatment options by consolidating patient history for easy access, review, and sharing.
2. E-mail and text reminders. Messaging helps patients remember to take medications as prescribed, order refills, and keep appointments.
3. Telehealth has risen with the global pandemic, and it offers promise for rural areas where doctors may be a long drive away. However, the technology only goes so far. Successful telehealth consults hinge on communication between the provider and patient. A pre-existing relationship helps, too, giving the provider insight into the patient’s medical history, support system, financial situation,, and willingness to follow professional advice.
4. “Dr Google.” As discussed above, doctors are seeing more patients who do their own research online, either before a consult, or once they have their bloodwork and test results in hand. Patients want to be involved in the decision-making process and talk to people before investing in a course of action.
5. Electronic content. In addition to the information that’s already publicly available online, thousands of medical journal and scientific research articles are published every day; more technical information than any human being can absorb. Professional and specialty content can be aggregated and even added to workflows as providers organize exam notes, lab results, patient history, and prescribe courses of treatment. At the point of care, practitioners can now access crucial information in a clinical setting and leverage decision support content like Wolters Kluwer UpToDate through an app or smart phone.

Healing will always benefit from a strong patient/doctor relationship. Technology can enhance and strengthen that relationship by adding knowledge, accurate diagnostic information, and successful treatment suggestions. The future state of business included in the Autonomous Digital Business envisions an interconnectedness as companies learn to be agile, adopt change enabled by intelligent technology, and use data to deliver better customer experiences. That’s certainly true for healthcare, and we can see the future patient experience taking shape in a number of ways:

• In remote geographies far from healthcare facilities, patients can check medications, research symptoms, and engage in telehealth consults through a mobile app on their smart phones.
• Chatbots will expand to automate up-front patient filtering, beginning with low-level screening information and initial questions followed by real-time input of data from wearables, saving practitioners time and effort, and increasing productivity. They can also steer patients to authoritative healthcare knowledge articles as appropriate.
• AI will help practitioners access content at the point of care; not as a robot standing beside them in a physical exam, but as a popup in a medical record workflow—like a spell check—suggesting additional diagnosis and treatment options.
• As telehealth grows, new self-service interactive capabilities will gather data that supports remote exams, and the traditional in-person exam will achieve data-driven efficiency.

As part of a future Transcendent Customer Experience where patients get what they want, when and where they want it, self-help and “self-health” will come together. Armed with ubiquitous digital access to decision-quality data, visualizations, trends, real-time feedback, records, and reminders, it will be easier for patients to stay healthy, make better decisions, work with their doctors, and adopt lifesaving habits.

Thank you to Dr. Michelle Jimerson (MD, MPH), of Yampa Valley Medical Associates in Steamboat Springs Colorado, and Physician’s Assistant Millie Flanigan of Steamboat Springs Family Medicine who shared insights on how technology is impacting the practice of modern family medicine in rural Northwest Colorado.

Healthcare is changing rapidly, even more in 2020 than anyone could have predicted, and it’s been a trial by fire for a lot of the technology. According to a recent Accenture study, 94 percent of healthcare executives said innovation in their organizations has accelerated over the past three years due to emerging technologies and 89 percent are already experimenting with them—and that was pre-pandemic.

The study included a theory they call “DARQ,” which encompasses distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), and quantum computing. Here we’ll take a look at those and others being implemented now and fast approaching, and how they can improve not only healthcare, but also the experience for patients and the workforce.

1. Distributed ledger/Blockchain

The distributed ledger, or blockchain, system of facilitating data exchange is already being used in healthcare to transfer records and patient information for billing and claims, but it can also track drugs and medical supply chains and even house genetic code. The multi-threaded nature of the technology ensures that each party is sharing the same, continuous, accurate information with a reduced probability of tampering or manipulation, which is vital when you consider the staggering number of healthcare data breaches.

Harvard Business Review recently looked at blockchain through the lens of health record management, saying, “By owning our medical and other personal data, we could solve access, security, privacy, monetization, and advocacy [issues]. The key is to take advantage of existing technologies to manage our data according to our own terms of use.”

They go on to explain that blockchain allows people to personally control their data, which is virtually unalterable, on a peer-to-peer basis. This type of data collection and dissemination is also being used as part of a pandemic planning “initiative to integrate, aggregate, and share” verified and anonymized global, local, and agency data to trace and get ahead of the spread of the coronavirus.

In China, blockchain technology helped fast-track insurance claims processing and mobile pay-outs at the onset of the coronavirus in Spring 2020. “Claim applicants can submit their supporting documents as evidence while investigation firms can get immediate access to them on the blockchain. All parties involved can see the entire process,” an Ant Financial spokesman in Beijing told the South China Morning Post.

2. Artificial intelligence (AI)

The adoption and integration of AI into processes and protocols walks a fine line between enabling a simple user experience and potentially impacting the human workforce. On the low end of AI, you can already ask Amazon’s Alexa to query WebMD, but ideally, AI will also support mundane tasks like billing, claims, and bad debt reduction so staff can instead focus on work that involves critical thinking, analysis, and decision-making. On the treatment end of the spectrum, it’s been deployed in diagnostic trials, such as mammography, where it reduced instances of false positive cancer diagnoses, and in the prediction of heart attacks and strokes.

A recent Emerj survey of healthcare executives found that over half of its respondents believe AI will be ubiquitous in healthcare by 2025. The survey also identified personalized medicine and drug development as ripe for AI, given its ability to use natural language and shave significant time off of otherwise lengthy processes.

Dr. Eric P. Weinberg, professor of clinical imaging sciences at the University of Rochester Medical College, adopted AI into his environment with the goals of improving efficiency and accuracy, freeing up personnel to do more meaningful tasks, and reducing work fatigue, as he wrote in a piece for the American College of Radiology. He drove the implementation of an AI tool to detect—but not diagnose—intracranial hemorrhages on a CT scan.

“The AI tool [was] designed to improve our workflow. [It] was extremely accurate at finding both obvious bleeds and extremely subtle bleeds…which can easily be missed by junior residents or even by experienced faculty when the caseload gets heavy,” he shared. He also noted that AI-read scans helped shorten the turnaround time between completing the scan and issuing the report to the doctor who requested it.

3. Extended reality

Virtual reality (VR)—wearables, augmented reality (AR)—social media image filters, and mixed reality (MR)—bringing virtual objects into a physical space where you can interact with them—are fairly recognizable terms these days, but the next evolution, extended reality (XR), encompasses all of those plus future technologies that will marry the experience of the real world with the immersive technology designed to simulate it.

According to Visual Capitalist, XR is projected to be a $209 billion market by 2022, with 71 percent of that in the healthcare sector, where it’s already in use for everything from headsets for pain and emotional control as an alternative to narcotics to 3D spatial diagnostic imaging. Going forward, XR is expected to have uses that include replacing cadavers as a no-risk training tool for medical students in labs.

4. Quantum computing

Supercomputing is an evolution of processing power beyond the average PC, but quantum computing goes exponentially beyond that, collapsing years into seconds. According to a recent study, the quantum computing market that was valued at $507.1 million in 2019 is projected to grow at a CAGR of 56 percent to reach almost $6.5 billion by 2030.

SD Global explored the idea that it could bring healthcare closer to patients by significantly speeding processes such as genetic sequencing, retinal imaging, and clinical trials by handling those massive data sets much faster. It could also enable personalized healthcare, down to the patient DNA.

Mark LaRow, CEO of patient-matching services provider Verato, tells Healthcare IT News that he envisions it as a way for teams of clinicians who currently use disparate tools and data collection methods to better communicate with each other and their patients. “Ultimately, I believe that these technologies will become so reliable that it will be deemed unethical for a clinician NOT to consult with a powerful AI-informed computing system to double-check a diagnosis and to recommend a treatment regimen,” he says.

According to Dr. James M. Dzierzanowski, executive director of Innovation and Strategic Advisory Services at Kaiser Permanente, a partner approach to implementation and taking advantage of rising talent will help ensure successful adoption when the time comes. “It’s still fairly nascent technology. I would recommend [working] with various industrial partners [and developing] strategic plans that will enable companies to rollover to this new technology,” he explains to AIMed. “We may [eventually] need a new workforce that deals with it [and I’m beginning] to see more people coming through university with statistics and data science knowledge [which] will fit into the application development for quantum in the future.”

5. Automation

Automation is prevalent in current patient contact roles such as automated appointment reminders and check-ins, but it also has potential behind the scenes and in the extended processes related to healthcare. A 2019 study by McKinsey looked at where automation could benefit the insurance/payer arena, saying it can deliver “greater workforce efficiency, lower demand for manual activities (through improved auto-adjudication and self-service capabilities), increased revenue (by refocusing employees on new activities), and often higher consumer satisfaction [especially in] data collection and processing.”

The study estimates costs savings “up to 30 percent over five years for payers who automate manual processes, and because the technology can run 24×7, tasks that took days can collapse into minutes and create a better user experience.”

PwC considers robotic process information (RPA), most commonly known as “bots,” as most useful for supply chain improvements. “Basic bots replace a number of human activities and can reduce cost and human errors while increasing compliance and efficiency,” they say. They also point to improved safety, quality, and employee morale and recommend leveraging the technology alongside wholesale improvement plans to achieve the best results.

Lessons to learn by

Each of these technologies stand to benefit the experience of healthcare workers and patients:

• Blockchain: Improve trust
• Artificial intelligence: Better accuracy of diagnosis
• Extended reality: Enhance physician training
• Quantum computing: Speed complex computing tasks and diagnosis
• Automation: Eliminate repetitive manual tasks and boost productivity

As value is realized, each must also meet a myriad of compliance, security, and privacy standards, especially concerning patients and their data. The learnings from the recent pandemic spotlight on these technologies will inform their innovations as they evolve, and the technologies that are sure to follow.

As the healthcare industry has pivoted in the face of an aging population and growing technological integration, it can no longer be siloed into individual components. It literally takes a village, or collaborative ecosystem, to deliver end-to-end patient care. And establishing, developing, and maintaining that ecosystem requires an awareness of and adherence to the many considerations of multi-party partnerships that begin and end with patient data. Embracing the opportunities an ecosystem presents also means accepting and preparing for its associated risks.

Defining ecosystem and risk

So, what exactly is a healthcare ecosystem? Think of it in terms of all the touch points involved in providing patient care. Gone are the days of a one-stop shop general practitioner and cash payment. Patients typically have a primary care physician, and then, dependent on their state of health, a care team composed of various specialists. From there, you can factor in everything from prescriptions to diagnostics (technicians, diagnosticians, and labs) to hospitalization (extended care teams and additional diagnostics and labs) to outpatient care (physical therapy, in-home care) to health insurance and billing. And each of those points of contact are handling precious personal data—usually electronically—which means greater opportunities for service disconnects and lapses, as well as breaches and compounded regulatory requirements for handling.

Risk related to healthcare is now an all-encompassing term. NEJM Catalyst discussed healthcare risk management in a 2018 brief as inclusive of “the clinical and administrative systems, processes, and reports employed to detect, monitor, assess, mitigate, and prevent risks.” It’s evolved from its former reference to the much narrower considerations of patient safety and medical errors to include “the expanding role of healthcare technologies, increased cybersecurity concerns, the fast pace of medical science, and the industry’s ever-changing regulatory, legal, political, and reimbursement climate.” It covers a lot, and as such, the healthcare industry has shifted its view of risk from reactive remediation (aftercare, if you will) to proactive prevention.

The American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) calls that new world order enterprise risk management (ERM), which uses technology to address comprehensive organizational risk mitigation vs. business unit-specific concerns, and data analytics to make decisions, unite departments, prioritize risks, and allocate resources across eight risk domains:

• Operational
• Clinical/patient safety
• Strategic
• Financial
• Human capital
• Legal/regulatory
• Technology
• Hazard

The role of technology

According to Hal Wolf, president and CEO of Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Inc. (HIMSS), a global advisor and thought leader that “supports the transformation of the health ecosystem through information and technology,” digital transformation has been a primary driver toward the ecosystem model. “The advancement in digital capabilities has demonstrated that payers, healthcare providers, vendors, technology solution providers, and patients have become more closely linked than ever before,” he said in December as he was looking toward 2020.

“We see all stakeholders within the health ecosystem working more closely…with patients as essential partners. [It’s] forcing us to look beyond the traditional methods of serving our patients in brick and mortar settings, and instead use innovation and technology to extend care outside the hospital in ways that better fit the needs of the consumer.”

Andy Shin, chief operating officer for the American Hospital Association Center for Health Innovation, reflected in a blog last fall that a successful ecosystem must measure more than the individual contribution of each member and instead look at how each makes the collective organization stronger by working together. “An ecosystem approach requires understanding each individual’s or organization’s role as part of a larger symphony of stakeholders. Then, an ecosystem leader or leaders must convince all stakeholders to play from the same sheet music,” he said.

“Magic occurs when providers, purchasers and payers, the public sector, communities, and entrepreneurs collaborate toward a shared purpose while playing complementary, but independent, roles in improving health. [To] be successful, a health care ecosystem must facilitate shared purpose, vision, and values, while still allowing for individual creativity and innovation to drive transformation.”

The future state of healthcare ecosystems

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions is already looking ahead—far ahead—to what the data-driven healthcare ecosystem could be in 2040. And they see the evolution happening in three seven-year cycles, starting now with a growing drive to give—and demand for patients to have—access to and ownership of their health information.

In The health plan of tomorrow, a 2019 crowdsourced study that focused on health insurers, researchers suggested that business models would transform quickly “as health plans shift to focus on improving wellness and care using multidimensional data [via] products [that] engage and influence consumers toward better health through a high-touch experience with digital devices.”

The study came away with three distinct future state areas, all built around data.

• Well-being and care delivery that aligns health plans with care delivery teams, including local and virtual options.
• Care enablement that looks beyond the claims process toward developing consumer products.
• Data and platforms that still support traditional compliance and reporting requirements but also use data and digital technologies to reduce care costs, streamline processes, achieve better outcomes, and create new revenue streams from customized offerings.

The study points out that some of the largest health plans are already seeing value in ecosystem modeling, entering “into joint ventures and acquisitions of hospitals, post-acute care providers, physician groups, and behavioral health providers.” They also see future operations and processes based on artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, automation, blockchain, and cloud computing, which will require migrating legacy technology to new and emerging alternatives.

As for the risks of doing business differently to meet an ever-changing market, the researchers advise that ethics and the policies and governance around accountability will need to be continually monitored and updated. If health plans are mindful of the guidance, “they will yield returns [from] better member health and wellness, diversified revenue streams, and improved operational efficiencies.”

In a separate 2018 study, The digital imperative, Deloitte looked at the larger issues of digital transformation in the healthcare sector and advised that an integrated health ecosystem could “break down traditional silos and enable frictionless stakeholder experiences [by] integrating players and connecting data in new ways that empower consumers, building [operational] flexibility…and [embracing] innovation.” At the heart of that, they stress the importance of developing best-in-class capabilities, both in-house and through partner relationships.

A truly unified, collaborative, multi-party ecosystem that safely shares, optimizes, and monetizes patient data and improves patient care could redefine healthcare. To get there, healthcare organizations must also remain mindful of—and vigilant about addressing—the inherent risks and plan for them as they optimize the latest technologies to streamline processes and achieve their goals.

If you’ve spent any time in and around healthcare facilities over the last few years, you’ve no doubt noticed that technology is everywhere. Human interactions between patients and practitioners are often complemented, or impeded, by the typing and screen tapping as your words are entered into a keyboard or a tablet.

Technology is also at the heart of inpatient and outpatient monitoring and tracking, from finding a hospital room for an incoming patient to moving patients around and between rooms and diagnostic treatment areas to keeping tabs on a heart monitor.

You know those 55-inch HD screens that track your airport departure and arrival times? Hospitals have them, too—monitoring patient vitals and locations on collective, quick-access nurses station data boards. What do all of these processes and tools have in common? Data. And data needs connectivity. If all these devices and people can’t talk to each other—and quickly—it’s all for naught.

The ascent of 5G is about to exponentially speed all of that data and open up lines of communication in brand new ways—both within and beyond the walls of the hospital. It will change how healthcare providers share critical information amongst themselves and between them and their patients—many of whom are currently left unserved solely on the basis of physical location. If everything goes to plan, high-speed networking will be pervasive and it’ll all be wireless.

5G—which is the next generation of networking that will not only supersede current 4G wireless standard as well as Ethernet and fiber—hangs its hat on speeding up communication channels in five areas:

• Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB)
• Ultra-reliable low latency communications
• Massive machine-type communications/massive Internet of Things (MIoT)
• High reliability/availability
• Efficient energy usage

5G market potential

Currently, 5G has limited availability. As of a Viavi survey in January, 2020, it’s up and running in 378 cities across 34 countries, and 303 cities are in the top ten countries that have it. 57 of those are in China, 50 in the U.S., and 31 in the U.K. But whenever and wherever it expands, its widespread adoption will be a boon across multiple market areas, including healthcare, where, according to recent Accenture figures, it’s already being used in some fashion by 16 percent of providers.

IHS Markit projects that by 2035, 5G will support 22.3 million jobs and enable $13.2 trillion in global economic output, with a value chain generating $3.6 trillion in economic output. The global healthcare IoT market, which is projected to grow to $534.3 billion by 2025, will no doubt owe a significant amount of that trajectory to 5G connectivity.

What 5G means to healthcare

5G is expected to revolutionize the way healthcare providers talk to each other and their patients—from faster transit of testing and diagnostic results to telemedicine to remote monitoring and surgery, robotics, and more. The telemedicine market that’s running on current, pre-5G network backbones was already valued at $45 billion in 2019 and is expected to have 19.3 percent CAGR from 2020 to 2026.

Spring 2020 has given telemedicine its biggest test yet as people turned to it in droves to seek medical care while adhering to social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders. A recent survey by Sage Growth and Black Book Market Research found significant satisfaction—78 percent—in telehealth services. Forty-three percent said it was as effective as an office visit and 31 percent said it was better. And that’s with the fits, starts, and lags of non-5G. Imagine the improvement—and adoption rate—when 5G drives those engagements.

In addition to telehealth advancements, 5G presents an opportunity for healthcare providers to deliver high-speed, life-saving services beyond their physical walls. According to a recent Accenture study, 82 percent of healthcare executives agree 5G will revolutionize their industry by offering new ways to provide products and services.

Those include data benefits like transmitting massive digital diagnostic files such as MRI results without the latency issues of current wired and wireless communications. Early and current 5G use cases also include remote patient monitoring that allows hospital-based clinicians to deliver treatment guidance to remote areas and field workers.

When literally every moment matters to save a life, 5G can aid in real-time surgical procedures. Eventually, it’s projected to power remote surgery and treatment using robotics, and support augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) and remote clinical care and wearables for mobile field support and telehealth. In those scenarios, highly-trained and experienced senior practitioners can lend their skills to remote and rural medical personnel from a single, centralized location.

Industry support for 5G

Dr. Shafiq Rab, chief information officer at Chicago’s Rush University System for Health, which is piloting the first 5G hospital in the U.S., shared his vision of what 5G could mean for enhanced, continuous patient care with Modern Healthcare. He foresees a nationwide 5G network that enables off-site monitoring so patients can go home faster and still receive top-tier care.

“When you go home, your connection back to the hospital…the doctor…the nurses does not stop,” he tells them. “Concurrent talking with five, seven, eight people together, your entire care team [online via video] becomes possible [with 5G].” Most people with a multi-doctor care team will tell you that’s not even an option now in an office setting.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), which represents over 2,800 chief information officers (CIOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders, filed a statement on the importance of 5G for a U.S. Senate committee meeting last year. They laid out their support and vision of it delivering virtual patient care “anywhere at any time to anyone” while also “untethering expensive medical diagnostic equipment like x-ray and MRI imaging machines to make them mobile in the hospital environment.”

The group highlighted the importance of speed and data delivery for real-time care while also opening the door to the next evolution of imaging, diagnostics, data analytics, and treatments. “Faster speeds combined with cloud-based storage will enable advanced digital networks capable of generating and leveraging large quantities of data in ways previously unimaginable,” they said.

In a CHIME blog post, John S. Lee, MD, chief medical information officer (CMIO) at Edward-Elmhurst Healthcare, points to the behind-the-scenes benefits, too. “The gigabit speeds will allow for intense computing on edge. The combination of the cloud with edge computing [could] further blur the lines between local computation and cloud-based computation,” he says. “This concept then opens the possibility for high-bandwidth, high-demand computing without requiring providers on the clinical front lines to tether themselves to physical hardware.”

Security challenges

With IoT devices set to reap the benefits of 5G, the security, or lack thereof, around them, the network, and the apps they support will need to be addressed. As Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst of IoT and mobile network infrastructure at International Data Corp (IDC), tells TechRepublic and ZDNet, “[Inefficient] end-point security…can leave those end-points open to security breaches [putting] much of the security heavy lifting on network and IT resources positioned further away from end-points,” he says.

“As the network itself is upgraded to 5G, the need to upgrade network security will also be present…[to address the] greater potential for intrusions from inside the network or through ‘middle-man’ attacks.” He goes on to suggest taking, “a closer look at ways to incorporate security measures more tactically [and] at more layers than…in prior network generations. As more IoT applications are run on the network [hosted on-prem] or in an edge cloud, securing applications…will be at the forefront of 5G security concerns.”

Paul Bevan, research director for IT infrastructure at Bloor Research, adds that designing security into IoT devices and services is another way to address the security question. “This should be backed up by adherence to policies and an increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate security operations,” he advises TechRepublic and ZDNet.

Some areas will have to wait for 5G

As with any new evolution of technology, the promises are many but the practicalities aren’t yet in place to deliver on them. While one of the boldest hopes for 5G is that it will be a great equalizer for healthcare delivery to rural areas, Glenn O’Donnell, vice president and research director at Forrester, says that’s still years away, at least in the U.S. “The FCC’s goal is to cover 90 percent of the population within five years. That’s absolutely not going to happen without substantial government subsidies,” he says.

“As a function of density, that 90 percent only covers 36 percent of the real estate in the U.S. Extending infrastructure to the boonies is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Reaching the remaining 64 percent of the real estate with 5G will take well over a decade—if it happens at all.”

It’s about the data

Healthcare providers have become, much like every other industry, a data-driven business. The ability to move that data around, on the edge and the cloud, is of the utmost importance. In many instances, the lives of the patients they serve, a.k.a. their customers, depend on the ultra-fast, secure transmission of that data and ubiquitous access to people and resources. 5G stands to not only improve the customer experience from providers to patients and their families, but also to exponentially expand that experience to everyone within the healthcare system, too.