What 5G Means to Health Care

Forbes, Business Insider, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The Economist, The Financial Times… all have proclaimed: 5G is the new standard.

The next generation of mobile communications promises far greater connectivity, with data transfer speeds 100 times greater than today’s fastest networks.

That means much faster mobile access to… well, everything.

Waiting for mobile downloads will be a thing of the past. Data transfer speeds will become so fast that download and upload times will be irrelevant. 5G essentially upgrades your mobile connectivity from dial-up to broadband.

5G networks will allow you to download a two-hour movie in under four seconds, versus the six minutes it takes right now.

And as far as gaming, 5G connectivity will lead to the advanced evolution of cloud-based gaming and give developers the tools needed to build cutting-edge augmented and virtual reality gaming engines. Think of something similar to the gaming technology in Ready Player One or Tron — fully immersive and interactive virtual universes where simulated creation is bound only by the imagination.

But entertainment is just one industry that will be revolutionized by 5G technology.

5G might even end up saving your life.

5G Is a Paradigm Shift for Health Care

It’s going to be big…

5G is set to completely transform the entire health care industry, offering a wide variety of new benefits for both patients and providers.

Some even see 5G as an entirely new chapter in health care’s history, going so far as to compare 5G’s impact on health care to breakthroughs such as the discovery of the germ.

Jennifer Esposito, worldwide general manager of health and life sciences at Intel, says:

When people finally understood what germs were and how they drove the spread of disease, it revolutionized healthcare… The convergence of technology — 5G and AI and sensors — is going to create this monumental shift that will transform how you understand people’s health, how you deliver treatment, and how you expand access to care and experts.

Esposito is not alone in her zeal.

In a recent report titled “The Path to 5G for Health Care,” senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Krishna Rao writes:

The healthcare vertical globally is all set for a paradigm change with an increasing adoption of devices with sensing equipment, technology and telemedicine evolution.

Big expectations.

But 5G is up to the task.

First, a little tech talk…

5G technology operates on something called the millimeter spectrum. This is a band of radio frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz).

4G technology operates at much lower frequencies: below 6 GHz.

Millimeter waves are much smaller and faster. That means they can transmit large amounts of digital data without clogging the network. And that’s the big deal about 5G.

See, 5G is more than just fast.

5G networks are also able to handle more traffic than their predecessors.

Much more — up to 10,000 times more!

5G is able to deliver data faster. And it’s also able to deliver more.

Think about it like this: If 4G is a garden sprinkler, 5G is a fire hose.

Using the more compact and faster-moving millimeter waves, more data can be transmitted faster than on lower frequencies.

And that’s critical to the evolving landscape of the health care industry.

How 5G Transforms Health Care

One of the first things 5G is going to do for health care is offer providers much better data management.

See, the health care industry is massive producer of data… and that’s really understating it.

A study completed by Stanford Medicine found that 153 exabytes of data was produced by the health care sector in 2013.

Never heard of an exabyte? I’m not surprised. It’s a very large unit of computer data equal to one quintillion bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

It’s an amount of data beyond consumer understanding.

To compare, the total sum of all the data held by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook combined is estimated to be about 1.2 exabytes.

Google only processes about 0.02 exabytes of data per day.

So 153 exabytes is an insane amount of data to be producing annually.

But that was in 2013.

In 2020, Stanford Medicine estimates the health care industry will produce 2,314 exabytes of data!

The health care sector is already producing hundreds of times more data than found on the entire internet every year. And that figure is growing at an astronomical rate.

Some estimates now suggest 30% of all the world’s data is health care-related.

But while there is a massive amount of data available, that information is not yet being used in relevant and meaningful ways. That’s where 5G steps in.

By adding 5G to existing architecture, health care providers will be able to collect and manage massive data loads in real time and interpret it into usable information to follow trends, detect changes, and identify problems with greater accuracy than ever before.

5G technology also creates a digital infrastructure for new smart health devices like advanced consumer-grade medical monitoring wearables.

Current remote monitoring technology is limited by network capacity. But 5G connectivity and speeds will allow automatic and secure transmission of wellness information to doctors in real time, giving caregivers previously unseen insight into the everyday health of their patients.

Going to the doctor for a regular checkup might even become a thing of the past. In the next few years, your doctor will be able to monitor your medical vitals in real time. A regular checkup in the 5G future might only be as involved as reading an email.

Constant and real-time health monitoring might seem a little invasive to some. But imagine if tragedy struck and you had a heart attack or stroke: Your doctor (as well as emergency services) would know immediately about your condition and be prepared to act. It could even save your life.

Also consider also how much better you’d feel about older family members and loved ones being monitored by their doctors in real time.

According to Anthem Inc., owner of Blue Cross Blue Shield, 86% of doctors say health monitoring wearables increase patient engagement with their own health. And they say wearables are predicted to decrease hospital costs by 16% in the next five years.

According to a recent report by Reports and Data, the global medical wearable device market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.5%, from $7 billion in 2018 to $27.5 billion in 2026.

5G technology will be the digital platform on which the next generation of medical wearable devices will be built.

Artificial intelligence is another 5G breakthrough that’s set to transform health care. New AI programs will be programmed to take full advantage of the health care industry’s massive data load to help doctors determine potential diagnoses and decide on the best treatment options for patients.

AI will also be used in tandem with medical wearables to help predict things such as post-operative complications, allowing early interventions if necessary.

According to a study published by MarketsandMarkets, the global AI market was worth $16 billion in 2017 but will reach more than $190 billion by 2025, for a CAGR of over 36%.

In addition to AI, 5G-powered augmented and virtual reality will also find greater use in health care.

Advanced augmented and virtual reality engines will further enhance doctors’ abilities to deliver innovative, less-invasive treatments. They will assist in training new doctors by simulating medical scenarios.

5G also opens the door to remote medical procedures. Robotic surgery already exists — but with the surgeon standing next to the robot rather than remotely. 5G will change that.

A 5G future will bring the most talented doctors and surgeons to the most needed, wherever they might be located. Recently, 5G networks have already allowed a Chinese surgeon to perform the world’s first remote brain surgery.

5G will also allow new data sources to be used in personal care. 5G technologies will be able to interpret and analyze voice and video inputs, giving health care an entirely new layer of information from which to draw and find new ways to engage in patient care.

Broadly speaking, 5G will offer more and new access to health care for patients outside of traditional hospital environments with new methods of providing and delivering treatments and services. It will give hospitals much-needed data management programs and power new innovations in remote monitoring, augmented/virtual reality, AI, robotics, big data, and a host of other fields.

For you, 5G does for health care what Amazon did for shopping — it’s going to bring more health care options to you, instead of you going to the health care.

Multinational telecom giant Ericsson predicts a $76 billion revenue opportunity in 2026 for operators addressing health care transformation with 5G.

But remember, health care is just one industry that’s going to be transformed by 5G

Manufacturing, transportation, defense, consumer electronics and appliances, agriculture, shipping and warehousing, education… all of these and more will see innovation from 5G.

That’s why guys like Chris DeHaemer are so amped up — 5G is a guarantee for investors.

5G is way bigger than just faster movie downloads. It’s way bigger than just health care. DeHaemer says:

5G is a globally transformative technology that will reshape the future in ways we can’t even imagine yet. The development of advanced AI, machine-to-machine systems, data analytics, and other future tech will serve to unlock more avenues with better vehicles for new innovation. In the meantime, investors will find profits swelling from 5G companies in what will certainly be one of the greatest investment opportunities of our lives.

DeHaemer has found a group of companies that control a major share of the infrastructure space that 5G networks are going to need.

These companies are said to control some 80% of the space major cell carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others are clamoring to get their hands on.

DeHaemer says, “It’s like they have a monopoly on the hottest real estate of the 5G future.”

Over the next several weeks, we plan to bring you more regarding how 5G will transform our lives and how to profit from the transition. So please be on the lookout for that.

But for now, I urge you to check out Chris DeHaemer’s report here.

5G is a guaranteed win for investors. But you need to be in the right positions. Check out Chris’ report. It’s pretty compelling.

Until next time,

Luke Burgess

As an editor at Energy and Capital, Luke’s analysis and market research reach hundreds of thousands of investors every day. Luke is also a contributing editor of Angel Publishing’s Bull and Bust Report newsletter. There, he helps investors in leveraging the future supply-demand imbalance that he believes could be key to a cyclical upswing in the hard asset markets. For more on Luke, go to his editor’s page.