How China is counting on 5G to improve health care

In Gaozhou, a city in China’s southwestern Guangdong province that is known for lychee, longan, and banana farms, finding quality medical treatment has long been an issue because of the lack of talent and resources. But that situation has recently changed in the agricultural heartland, thanks to the latest advance in mobile communications: 5G.

Photo credit: Kārlis Dambrāns

Surgeons at the People’s Hospital of Gaozhou got first-hand experience with how ultra-fast 5G connection works in April, when they performed an operation on a 41-year-old female patient whose congenital cardiac defect deteriorated to heart failure.

Their procedure was monitored by a team of doctors, located about 400 kilometers (248 miles) away at the Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, who provided instructions in real time over a 5G-linked remote consultation system.

“Try to stay away from the triangle area mapped in 3D, or else stitches could cause myocardial damage,” said the Guangdong doctors, who watched the surgery live on a high-definition screen, while two other displays showed the patient’s dynamic ultrasonography and a three-dimensional rendering of her heart. The surgeons in Gaozhou had the same set of screens in their operating room.

In China, with a population of about 1.4 billion at the end of last year, the stakes are high for health care to become one of the major applications for 5G mobile technology because the world’s second-biggest economy still must contend with an acute shortage of qualified doctors and nurses.

Next-generation 5G mobile technology – which offers faster data rates, reduced latency, energy savings, cost reductions, higher system capacity, and massive device connectivity – is expected to drive efficiency in health care and other industries as China already has the world’s largest mobile market by subscriber and network size.

The country had about 1.2 billion 4G subscribers at the end of April.

“With 5G, doctors can remotely check patients’ vital signs in real time and pursue immediate action,” said Fei Hongwen, vice-director of assistive diagnosis at the Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, in a statement. “It would help provide more time [for health care professionals] to treat patients, instead of [being burdened with] commuting from one hospital to the next to do so.”

In the case of the surgical procedure in Gaozhou, the patient’s 600-megabyte ultrasonography file was transmitted in one second via the 5G-linked remote diagnostics platform, according to the Guangdong hospital’s estimate. By comparison, that file would have taken 20 minutes to send over a fixed-line broadband connection and three minutes via 4G.

Photo credit: Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine

The Guangdong provincial hospital is among a group of institutions that are working with telecommunications network operator China Mobile and infrastructure supplier Huawei Technologies to develop and test a range of applications with 5G ahead of its commercial rollout on the Chinese mainland.

Their 5G collaboration is expected to support more initiatives in telediagnosis, remote surgeries, and smart hospitals across China, where quality health care services common in urban areas are being made available in far-flung rural areas as well for emergencies in which patients in critical condition cannot be moved to another location.