US healthcare providers AdventHealth and Tampa General Hospital (TGH) have signed deals with Verizon Business for neutral host or combination neutral host and private 5G networks.
AdventHealth is a non-profit medical organisation headquartered in Altamonte Springs, Florida, that operates facilities in 10 states across the US, offering a range of services, including primary care, specialty care, urgent care, imaging, rehabilitation and home health. It employs more than 100,000 caregivers in physician practices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies and hospice centres.
Tampa General Hospital is a 1,040-bed non-profit hospital, tertiary, research and academic medical centre located on Davis Island in Tampa, Florida, servicing western Florida and the greater Tampa Bay region. TGH is said to be one of the region’s only university-level academic medical centres, and is licensed for 982 beds, with approximately 15,000 team members and providers.
Verizon Business says healthcare CIOs and business decision-makers are currently facing a surge in operational complexity at their facilities. It added that the growth of electronic patient records, specialised connected equipment and telehealth has led to an explosion of healthcare data, which can create bottlenecks that slow down clinicians and administrators if not met with appropriate networking capability.
Simultaneously, it observed that healthcare campuses are evolving to accommodate multiple network user groups with varied needs – for example, patients and visitors requiring reliable connectivity while on site, staff conducting increasingly digitised operational work, and care providers and technical experts using specialised equipment with heightened security and bandwidth requirements.
In short, the operator regards healthcare environments as ideal settings for flexible, onsite data networks. They must accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of devices at a time, serve users of varying data requirements, and accommodate technologies that serve public, private and highly specialised application sets, both for day-to-day operations and future-facing initiatives.
To meet these challenges, the company believes the combination of neutral host and private 5G networks helps manage increasingly complex data needs for varied user groups at its facilities – for example, neutral host for patients, visitors and other public-network users, and private 5G for mission critical operations.
Moreover, the operator sees the network combination as helping to cover evolving connectivity needs for diverse device sets, user groups and data capabilities. These include connected hospital equipment for care provision; administrative and office equipment for operation and personal devices for general use; and the creation of user groups such as doctors, nurses and care providers, as well as executives, administrators, research experts, patients, visitors, and onsite staff.
Verizon Business said neutral host and private 5G networks combined can support a growing density of connected devices with varying security, bandwidth and capability requirements for diverse user groups, as well as offer flexible connectivity for business continuity and future-proofing for facility expansions and transformations.
The Neutral Host Network component is said to be able to allow the general public to automatically achieve a strengthened mobile signal on a specific premises via dedicated network infrastructure onsite. Receiving a strengthened signal requires no special action on the part of the visitor; the campus becomes just like any public setting with ideal cellular reception.
In parallel, to support critical care-delivery services and sensitive data workflows for the hospital, facilities can deploy secure, high-bandwidth and low-latency private 5G networks side-by-side with neutral host networks. In addition to enabling data-intensive, mission critical hospital operations, the private networks also serve as a platform for future-tech readiness and innovation, allowing the hospital administration to pilot applications and incorporate new connected devices and technology.
Ericsson is the platform provider to Verizon for the on-premise network buildouts.
