Cleveland Clinic outfitted its newest hospital with a private 5G network to make its internet more stable and secure and give it the capacity for advances in medical imaging and augmented reality.
The health system's 34-bed Mentor (Ohio) Hospital, which opened July 11, will be a good testing site for the technology because it is a smaller hospital and has use cases that are already set up, such as patient kiosks, patient monitoring and infotainment, Cleveland Clinic Chief Technology Officer Shibu Thomas told Becker's. It marks the first non-U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital using private 5G from Verizon Business.
Typically, a hospital's Wi-Fi network is unlicensed and accessible by patients and providers alike, so patient care competes with visitors' devices for network speed, Mr. Thomas explained. Private 5G can support thousands of medical devices, each of which gets its own SIM card, making the network "infinitely more scalable."
High-speed imaging requires a lot of bandwidth and typically relies on wired internet now, Mr. Thomas said. Virtual reality — both in surgery and medical education, for instance — will also get a boost from 5G. At some hospitals using it, surgeons hold tablets over patients' bodies to locate the precise locations of tumors or tissues.
"Once those use cases are identified that really bring a business value, it's going to help develop a business case for why we need to deploy this to more sites," Mr. Thomas said. "I always look at it as: You have to build the train tracks before the train arrives."
He said manufacturers have already reached out to Cleveland Clinic about using the hospital as a testbed for their 5G-enabled products.
"Everyone's sort of just waiting for adoption, where providers are waiting for device manufacturers and others to adopt it, and they're waiting for providers to be able to support the technology," he said. "Now it seems there's a lot of interest in it. There's a lot of R&D going on. And this provides a real-world scenario."