Electronic Health Reporter

By John Tonthat, CRO, Cellhub.

The US healthcare system is coming up against a variety of challenges, but one of the most crucial is meeting the needs of our aging population. As the care requirements of the long-tail Baby Boomer generation shifts, their needs are predicted to surpass the capacity of hospitals across the country in short order.

In what is being called “The 2030 Problem,” that milestone year will see the entirety of this demographic exceed the age of 65, equating to one out of every five Americans. The US Census Bureau estimates that more than 11,000 people turn 65 each day. In an analysis by Dr. Richard Leuchter, University of California, Los Angeles, he states that without significant intervention, hospitals could reach a critical 85% occupancy by 2032. This represents a dangerous threshold, since CDC modeling data has revealed that when ICU occupancy hits 75% nationwide, an estimated 12,000 excess deaths will occur within the following two-week period.

Connectivity as a Critical Healthcare Infrastructure

It will literally be impossible for hospitals to physically expand the amount of staffed, facility-based beds required to stave-off a crisis by this token. Hospitals have no choice but to expand their care virtually, modernizing their infrastructures to accommodate digital-first clinical operations including remote monitoring and virtual in-home care.

Thousands of facilities are currently scrambling to figure out how to accomplish this, because modernization of technology can be expensive, and networks that can accommodate both internal connectivity and mobile or remote care must be both extremely robust, expansive, and secure. This means that Wi-Fi and cellular have become not just a nicety for high-speed Internet, but more of a table-stakes utility, as vital as electricity and heat, in order to keep hospitals serving the needs of the public into the future.

According to the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) the roadmap to an effective digital-first hospital contains six major goals, comprised of both immediate priorities and long-term objectives. Literally half of these involve upgrades to broadband and cloud-based digital infrastructures that seamlessly integrate patient data, including the integration of edge computing to support AI “to ensure continuous, high-speed connectivity over all care settings.”

As networking capabilities become more sophisticated, hospital administrators have found that a single infrastructure (e.g., either 5G/6G or Wi-Fi) is not satisfactory in addressing the needs of both internal connectivity and mobility. A combination of top-flight 5G/6G and Wi-Fi networks are required to address the demands of both existing internal hospital systems and allow for the expansion of the network into mobile and virtual settings. This is the key to increasing capacity without having to physically build new spaces that will house the aging patients of the future.

A converged cellular/LAN/WAN connectivity network addresses a multitude of issues currently affecting healthcare organizations across the country.

Improved clinical communication: High-end connectivity will dramatically improve internal communication and seamless transfer of data between different areas of a healthcare campus. Practitioners are consistently traversing hospital buildings, going from room to room, floor to floor, and even campus to campus. Too often, ill-designed Wi-Fi networks cause doctors and nurses to experience data drops as they enter an elevator or proceed to a patient’s room in a far-flung wing. In those instances, digital information can altogether disappear from their devices. This leads to practitioners taking work home with them, aggravating their workload and contributing to staff burn-out.

Shift to Always-On Care: Trends have been accelerating towards telehealth installations, use of mobile clinicians and hybrid or work-from-home scenarios for overburdened practitioners, and emerging remote monitoring of patients. This is especially useful in addressing the “Aging in Place” trend to deliver more care for seniors in their home environments as they continue to age, as opposed to requiring them to frequent a facility.

Isolated recovery environments: Hospitals have a vital need for data resiliency in the cloud, to ward off any network failures through either natural disaster, or the intervention of malicious hackers. It hasn’t been beyond the realm of possibility that a hospital system gets taken for ransom or is knocked off-line by a weather emergency—denying the ability for doctors and nurses to prescribe medication, review medical records, or utilize connected equipment. This is simply not an acceptable scenario.

Required Continuity: Hospitals tend to plan for power outages, but not network outages. Yet delivery of care now depends heavily on connectivity uptime. A 5G/6G network with a major carrier can serve as a resiliency network, creating an active recovery environment. An intelligently designed fail-safe system can allow data traffic to immediately divert to a resilient network layer, empowering a hospital to continue functioning, providing contiguous care as normal until the main network is restored.

Continuity of care is a key initiative of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS and FEMA have been inconspicuously reaching out to healthcare systems, compelling them to develop a continuity of operations plan (COOP) to ensure the viability of essential hospital functionality during emergencies or cyber-attacks. These functions include operations, patient care, and staffing. Much of the recovery initiatives recommended by government agencies and cybersecurity companies involve the ability to provide a seamless failover connectivity layer that explicitly connects to network back-up throughout a hospital campus.

This includes all networks associated with the facility. The truth is, bad actors are out there, looking to disrupt networks and steal data. And even less predictably, bad circumstances like weather emergencies will also always present a threat. In the event of a catastrophe—whether a terrorist attack, a climate-related disaster, or even a mundane ransomware issue—the DHS is demanding that healthcare companies have network resiliency plans in place.

“The future of healthcare is seamlessly connected care,” stated Rachelle Longo, AVP, Telemedicine from Ochsner Health, in an article for the ATA Center of Digital Excellence (American Telemedicine Association). “Those who invest in modern infrastructure today will define the next era of patient-centered, technology-driven care.”

Leveraging AI to Create Cost Defrayment

We know that modernization of a healthcare network is far easier said than done, however. Revamping a connectivity infrastructure has typically been a hugely complicated and costly undertaking, requiring detailed knowledge of telecommunications and requiring the cooperation of a multitude of technology providers and services management.

This is why new models such as working with an aggregator with knowledge of the telecom field and utilizing granular, AI-based cost-analyses to identify areas of savings that can be applied to defray costs are gaining ground. Such methods warrant an entire additional discussion, but consider that AI capabilities have never been powerful enough in the past to accommodate detailed enough analysis of healthcare organization expenditures to identify large enough areas of savings to help fund modernization.

So in this new era of high-performance cellular-Wi-Fi convergence, combined with the accelerated capabilities of AI, the healthcare industry can foresee a path to drive clinical operations forward that is not only technologically achievable, but also financially feasible.