The Vital Pulse of Healthcare: Why We Must Standardize 5G for Medical Devices
For decades, the "hospital of tomorrow" has been a recurring theme—a vision of a fully autonomous, hyper-connected facility where data flows seamlessly to save lives. At Verizon, we see this not as a distant finish line, but as the evolving connected hospital: a community asset built on a secure, scalable network that serves as a life-supporting system in its own right.
As we move further into 2026, the healthcare industry is facing a critical bottleneck. The explosion of Medical IoT (IoMT) and AI-driven diagnostics is placing an unsustainable burden on legacy Wi-Fi. Establishing a global industry standard that prioritizes Private Wireless Networks (PWN) and integrated cellular connectivity for medical devices can help unlock the next era of clinical innovation by allowing practitioners to reliably test out and scale new and emerging digital solutions that emphasize patient care and enhance operational efficiency.
The Hidden Dangers of Wi-Fi Congestion in Hospitals
The reliance on Wi-Fi for critical care connectivity is increasingly unreliable. What we’re hearing from customers is that in today’s hospitals, the "noise" on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands is often deafening. Hospital visitors and clinicians doing administrative tasks compete for the same bandwidth as necessary medical devices, such as infusion pumps and telemetry monitors.
With the current IEC 80001-1 standard, hospital IT departments are responsible for the safety of medical devices on their network. Managing interference and latency on a shared Wi-Fi network creates both administrative burden and liability. The answer is a dedicated, minimal interference solution, such as PWN.
A PWN provides a dedicated, "clean slate" spectrum. Unlike Wi-Fi, which is an open broadcast, a Private 5G network is invisible to any device not specifically provisioned with a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) or eSIM.
The shift to a cellular-first standard offers three transformative advantages:
Democratizing Care through Infrastructure
Establishing this standard can also be seen as a prerequisite to democratizing care—especially as hospitals and health clinics seek ways to address staffing shortages. PWNs, for example, are designed to mitigate the connectivity issues that can occur on shared Wi-Fi networks. They can help provide the very low latency and high reliability necessary to seamlessly power solutions that monitor patients in near real-time, such as virtual nursing platforms.
Furthermore, as we expand care beyond hospital walls, we need devices that seamlessly transition from a Private 5G network in the facility to a public 5G network at a patient's home or satellite clinic. Consider Proto Hologram—a technology Verizon is already supporting. High-fidelity, 3D holographic consultations allow world-class specialists to "beam" into rural clinics. This requires the stable, massive bandwidth that a standardized 5G approach can provide. Without integrated cellular standards, these life-saving innovations often remain tethered to only the most expensive, custom-integrated facilities.
A Call for Industry-Wide Alignment
At Verizon, we work closely with our healthcare partners to determine how to best support their “hospital of tomorrow” architecture. Pioneers in the space are actively embedding PWNs into their new hospital builds to help design from the ground up to meet current and future operational and AI needs, including powering connected devices such as smart hospital beds, real-time location services, wayfinding, asset tracking, and more.
I believe that in the coming years, PWNs will be the standard requirement for every new hospital build. The reality is that the vast majority of hospitals are years away from being able to do so.
By standardizing 5G and Private Wireless connectivity for medical devices, we can help hospitals and health clinics that may not have the resources to upgrade their entire network infrastructure with the connectivity and solutions they need to improve patient care. The goal is to remove the manual, labor-intensive administrative work and the connectivity "jitter" that plagues clinicians today.
The transition from Wi-Fi-first to cellular-first, optimally 5G, for medical devices requires a collaborative shift. By transitioning from "connectivity as an accessory" and integrating eSIM technology as a standard feature in healthcare devices, we can help provide the foundation for the hospital of tomorrow.
We encourage medical device manufacturers and healthcare executives to explore this shift! Together, we can support the evolution of the connected hospital, empowering clinicians with secure and reliable connectivity needed to enhance patient care.