Becker's Hospital Review

56 CIO / HEALTH IT Why Cleveland Clinic went with private 5G over Wi-Fi for its newest hospital By Giles Bruce C leveland 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. e 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 omas 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. omas 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. omas 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. omas 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. ere's a lot of R&D going on. And this provides a real-world scenario." n Ochsner Health uses iPhone technology to remotely monitor patients By Naomi Diaz N ew Orleans-based Ochsner Health's chief clinical transformation officer, Richard Milani, MD, said the health system is using iPhone technology to monitor gait, AMA Update reported July 31. The health system uses artificial intelligence to identify patients at risk for falls and pairs that with the remote technology, which helps identify the populations most at risk. Ochsner then has a completely virtual program that patients go through so that they can reduce falls. The combination of remote technology and AI allows the health system to collect data through passive monitoring so that it can see "who's doing what and who's getting better," according to Dr. Milani. "I think what's going to happen over time is that as technologies continue to be more improved, our abilities to identify populations with a problem are going to be real," Dr. Milani said. "And we're going to not have to wait on them to figure it out. We should be able to help figure it out for them and respond in the moment." n Image Credit: Cleveland Clinic Newsroom

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