Anyone who has spent time in a hospital room probably remembers: the lukewarm food on compartmentalized trays, the nurse visits in the middle of the night, and the cables. The cables are everywhere, and each time patients venture out of bed they must navigate them. From TV monitors to heart rate monitors, from nurse call buttons to landline phones, everything in a hospital room seems to be connected to a wire or cable.
Cord cutting is just one reason many healthcare facilities want to improve their wireless connectivity. They also want to connect to patients wirelessly so that their medical monitoring of that individual can continue when the patient goes home. And hospitals want better in-building wireless. Despite all the wires in the rooms, the critical communication between healthcare providers is wireless – text messages, images, and phone calls that absolutely have to go through. Immediately.
So hospital CIOs and CTOs don’t just want wireless; they want high-bandwidth, low latency, reliable, secure, dedicated mobile connectivity.
Private 5G could be ideal for hospitals. But some healthcare facilities may struggle to justify investments in this technology. Hospitals are more likely to operate in the red than in the black, so capital expenditures that show a clear path to cost savings are sometimes the most attractive.
At Stanford Healthcare and School of Medicine, CTO Christian Lindmark was able to justify an investment in a CBRS-neutral host network, which has laid the groundwork for private 5G. The neutral host 5G network made sense for three reasons, Lindmark said. First, the university was building a new 824,000-square-foot hospital and did not have a plan for 5G coverage inside. Second, Stanford bought Tri-Valley Hospital in Pleasanton, CA, a property that lacked in-building coverage altogether. And third, the property around Stanford’s main hospital used an aging distributed antenna system that was due for an upgrade.
“Distributed antenna infrastructure is not cheap; it is actually quite expensive,” Lindmark said recently on a webinar hosted by Celona. “Especially in hospital facilities, it is more expensive to go in and retrofit, so we were trying to figure out how do we provide a more cost-effective solution to replace these older DAS solutions? And that’s when we really started to dive into 5G as an option.”
5G might not have made financial sense in the context of a private network, but it did in the context of the public carrier networks since Stanford was already committed to enabling connections to these networks. “Adding new technology without a hard dollar cost savings is really tough,” said Lindmark. But the neutral host radios that can connect to all three public networks offered savings. “We think we can reduce our costs 40% over a traditional DAS solution,” Lindmark projected.
Now that the neutral host network is in place, Lindmark looks forward to exploring possibilities for private 5G using CBRS-enabled devices. He would like to see all wireless handheld communication devices move to a private network, including 4,000 shared clinical devices, 6,000 hospital-owned cell phones, 7,000 personal phones used by staff, 2,500 tablets, and 1,200 radios used by hospital and parking lot staff. And all that could be just the beginning.
“If we really plan this right, we could get most of our IT use cases in the hospital … we could move them all to 5G, and I really want to explore that,” Lindmark said. “We put a lot of wire into our hospitals, [and that means] more cooling, more power, more network switching. Is it possible that we could reduce the cabling infrastructure required by half, put more of this onto a private 5G network? I’m intrigued to consider that.”
Public carrier approaches
Other hospitals are taking a different approach to private 5G by working with the nationwide network operators. In Los Angeles, the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine worked with AT&T to build a private 5G network to connect clinical devices to edge servers that can use AI to analyze patient data. The network was conceived as a tool to also connect doctors and patients, through digital bracelets.
In Massachusetts, Boston Children’s Hospital CIO Heather Nelson told The Wall Street Journal her facility is working with T-Mobile to develop a private 5G network to support hospital staff, visitors, patients, and medical devices, which she said are increasingly likely to come with embedded 5G modems.
In Ohio, Cleveland Clinic recently opened a new facility with a private 5G network provided by Verizon and Ericsson. The network is expected to connect check-in kiosks, in-room infotainment, medical equipment, mobile stroke units, and Verizon iPhones carried by hospital staff, patients, and visitors.
These institutions prove that healthcare does not always lag behind other industries when it comes to communications infrastructure, but healthcare professionals themselves will tell you their industry is absolutely not on the bleeding edge of IT or mobile. Future investments will likely be driven by opportunities to help patients and save money. The rate at which hospitals invest in private 5G will probably be linked to the rate of development of healthcare applications and devices that leverage the technology. In particular, monitoring systems for home-based patients are an ideal use case for cellular.
“I absolutely believe 5G and private networks are the future,” said Stanford’s Lindmark. “If we really want to transform healthcare and if we want to make our patients’ lives better and actually bring care to our patients where they are, 5G is critical to making that happen.”
