What Will 5G Mean for Healthcare?

The above tweet also included an image, but I decided it was too disturbing to embed on this blog. Yeah, I know that means you all just clicked through to see it. While a bit disturbing, the picture definitely made me stop and ask the question, “What does 5G mean for healthcare?”

I’m not sure how many people have been following 5G, but it’s getting really close to becoming a reality. For those not familiar with the technology, here’s an anecdote that highlights how fast 5G can be “In testing, the transfer speeds for the “5G” network sent data at 1.056 Gbit/s to a distance of up to 2 kilometers.”

1 Gig per second. What would it mean that you could transfer 1 Gig per second wirelessly? Now, I should note that it’s going to take some time for the devices to be able to support these kinds of speeds. Plus, it will also take the applications time to figure out what to do with this type of speed. However, it changes how we think about what we’re streaming completely.

In healthcare, those radiology images that are so big would be nothing to share with anyone anywhere anytime. You could literally have multiple HD cameras filming your healthcare experience live in real time with no issues at that speed. Genomic data is huge, but it could easily be shared with these types of speeds to anyone that needs it anywhere.

This is just the obvious stuff. What’s so incredible about reaching new types of breakthrough speeds like this is that it enables us to discover new opportunities that we couldn’t even think of previously because the speeds made that type of thinking impossible. When you look at the volume of data that sensors will be streaming about our lives, you can see why these speeds could be extremely valuable. Plus, at these speeds, federated data becomes much easier to stomach because you know even large data sources are available with ease.

What do you think of 5G data? How do you think it will impact healthcare? It’s amazing how broadband changed so many things we do online and enabled so many new services. 5G could and likely will do the same.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • This could help in real time monitoring of critical care data of patients on life support in remote monitoring cases. For wearable devices more parameters could be loaded for real time monitoring.

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