Data is rapidly becoming the key to modern healthcare, with personalised healthcare records and an increased emphasis on value-based care making medical practice need ever greater information for diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and continuity of care. Although Wi-Fi has long been the backbone of this environment, cellular connectivity can offer a more reliable alternative, especially for latency-sensitive use cases and remote care provision. As a result, we expect over 400 million active healthcare cellular IoT connections by 2030.
The Rise of 5G Healthcare
Circuit-switched cellular has been a background piece of healthcare service delivery for many years, and the sunset of circuit-switched networks will bring many device refreshes in several markets, including a leap to 5G as a framework for healthcare cellular technology.
5G has brought many new features to the telecoms landscape, beyond simply enabling higher speeds and more data throughput. The architecture allows several features that can bring benefits to healthcare provision and management. As such, we expect over 100 million active 5G healthcare connections worldwide in 2030.
LTE has previously had an advantage over 5G because more LTE devices were available, but there is a growing number of 5G devices, enough to support most healthcare use cases. Right now, the main consideration for 5G devices is whether to choose RedCap/eRedCap or full 5G. The price of RedCap connectivity modules is already getting close to LTE in China, and falling elsewhere, if a little more slowly. The main limit on choosing RedCap will be the need to use 5G SA (5G Standalone), which is not available everywhere. While this isn’t necessarily a problem for hospitals, which can deploy 5G SA private networks at hospitals, the rising use of home healthcare means that if a device OEM wants to sell into the healthcare market, the state of MNOs’ public networks needs to be considered.
5G has the highest wireless bandwidth available, but isn’t always faster than wired connectivity. As such, it may not be the best option for ubiquitous connectivity across high-traffic sites, but has strong advantages where wired connectivity can’t be used. It can be used for FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) in remote and rural settings effectively, as well as providing strong temporary networks, such as for disaster recovery. Several CSPs, from MNOs to specialised MVNOs, have developed solutions for this second case, like rugged mobile base stations for temporary deployments. While not specific to healthcare, these can serve as connectivity to first responders when there’s a disaster or another reason that public networks are down. They will, however, require other solutions for device provisioning and other elements alongside the connectivity itself.
The Place of Private Networks
Private networks can serve a number of different use cases in a healthcare context. The most prominent of these has been hospitals, to produce more reliable wireless coverage than Wi-Fi. Despite regulatory support, the use of private 5G networks has been slow; European hospitals with private 5G remained in single figures for most of 2024 and 2025. This is because Wi-Fi and LTE are often good enough for many healthcare uses (even video calling in cases without a need for minimal latency), and bringing together an existing web of cellular and non-cellular tech in a live hospital environment is complex, making it hard to deploy private networks into healthcare environments that aren’t new builds. This is as much a schematic and semantic problem as it is an operational one; merging the interfaces and management systems of different technologies will be one of the biggest challenges, particularly where hospital tech teams are unfamiliar with cellular architectures.
Regulatory pressure is likely to be the biggest driver for private 5G in a hospital context. Most self-contained hospital use cases can perform on LTE speeds and cabled infrastructure, particularly those that use smartphones and tablets for communication, as they can use Wi-Fi most of the time, and don’t need high speeds or throughput. As such, private LTE is often enough for these use cases. However, 5G is often useful for its architectural flexibility, which can help drive efficiency gains provided by the network.
Network APIs
5G has brought renewed interest in APIs for operators, which are intended to allow exposure to several network functions for applications and devices, particularly through the GSMA Open API initiative and CAMARA. Although technically capable of working with 4G as well, many network API capabilities leverage 5G-specific network elements.
The healthcare industry’s requirements have several strong applications for network APIs. In particular, healthcare is seen as a strong use case for established QoD (quality on demand) APIs, and the dedicated network and slice booking features that are part of CAMARA’s roadmap. This can provide consistent QoS for healthcare applications that need it, without requiring a permanent slice for the service. This can provide another mechanism to ensure high call priority for emergency services during periods of high network traffic, independent of SIM-level controls used in many countries.
Your Healthcare Connectivity Strategy
Interested in learning more about healthcare connectivity to best position your strategy for the sector? Access our “Healthcare Connectivity Opportunities 2026” report to understand the connectivity needs of this critical industry, and how cellular technology can best benefit the entire healthcare value chain.
Kaleido members can now access the full report through the member portal.
Blog Author: James Moar (Principal Analyst)