Healthcare is facing a seismic shift in the way it operates. New and developing technologies like AI, automation, IoT, and 5G are paving the way for digital, personalized, and proactive ways of caring that will improve patient outcomes, cut costs, and drive growth.
Across the Western world, the healthcare industry faces a lack of qualified staff, an aging population, and a rise in chronic conditions: In the US, for example, people with chronic and mental health conditions account for as much as 90% of healthcare expenditure. From an operational perspective, healthcare organizations are also battling fragmented care, data silos, and the high cost of drugs and other treatments.
Many of these issues are likely to intensify in the years ahead. Healthcare organizations are betting on technology to help them cope with these challenges, but what does that mean for networking and security?
How Is AI Being Used in the Healthcare Sector?
Two-thirds of healthcare organizations have deployed AI use cases to at least some extent across the organization, with some or all achieving ROI or business value.
Administration is a common use case in this sector, since administrative complexity is estimated to cost US healthcare organizations $265.6 billion every year. Paperwork and administration are a significant burden on healthcare practitioners whose time could be better spent elsewhere, especially since the US is predicted to face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
AI tools are helping to save time and increase efficiency by automating tasks and workflows like transcribing patient consultations, handling routine communications, and managing authorizations and reimbursements.
AI promises much more than simple administrative efficiencies, though. It’s increasingly being used for earlier and more accurate diagnoses, and to monitor the condition of patients so that critical healthcare events can be identified and mitigated earlier.
The National Health Service in the UK, for example, is using AI to analyze lung scans and identify potentially cancerous lumps earlier and more easily. Similarly, Tampa General Hospital has reduced the early death rate from sepsis from 6% to 4% using an AI-powered early warning system.
AI also has a critical role to play in the discovery of more effective new drugs and treatments. It’s likely to show increasing value in providing more personalized care too, by mapping genetic markers to avoid adverse reactions and to find the most effective treatments for each individual patient.
How Are Digital Twins Helping Improve Care?
Digital twins – virtual models of a system, a process, an object, or a person – are also beginning to be harnessed in healthcare. Digital twins allow healthcare providers to simulate how organs or people will respond in various scenarios, allowing for more effective treatments with lower risk.
GE HealthCare and Mayo Clinic, for example, are collaborating on an initiative that creates digital models of patients from imaging and ongoing monitoring tools to personalize radiation treatment and cancer care for better outcomes.
What Role Is IoT Playing in Healthcare?
Wearable devices and sensors record information like ECG readings, respiratory rates, and blood glucose.
These devices are already in widespread use for tracking chronic diseases, but they’re also being deployed to monitor and manage acute but stable conditions without the patient needing to stay in hospital (this is also known as a “hospital at home” service). We’re likely to increasingly see these devices used for earlier diagnoses and proactive and personalized treatments too.
IoT devices are also being used to track the location of equipment, reducing the number of assets lost and helping staff to find the apparatus they need more quickly. Critical equipment like MRI scanners can also be connected for predictive maintenance, increasing uptime and reducing running costs.
What Does This Emerging Tech Mean for Healthcare Infrastructure?
Legacy Networks and Skills Aren’t Always up to the Job
Traditional networks weren’t designed to support technologies like AI and automation, or to accommodate large quantities of connected devices. But many healthcare organizations are still relying on outdated infrastructure, even though this can’t provide the capacity, latency, and security that these technology developments demand.
Complexity is a challenge, too. Many healthcare organizations are coping with a mix of vendors and connectivity types, creating a network that’s hard to manage, lacks visibility, performs poorly, and can’t easily adapt to new technology.
A lack of skilled networking professionals is compounding this issue, with 36% of organizations across all sectors reporting this as a challenge.
More Data Isn’t the Only Problem
All these new developments have one thing in common: They all involve moving data around.
That puts a lot of pressure on healthcare networks, but not only because there’s a lot more traffic. It’s also because these applications and use cases can have very different performance, security and compliance requirements. For example:
• Depending on the use case, AI can demand continuous high capacity and low latency for delay-sensitive applications, or the ability to cope with periodic “bursty” traffic
• Digital imaging demands very high capacity to transmit large files without excessive delay (an uncompressed CT scan of the heart is about 1 GB, for example)
• Hospital at home and IoT monitoring services may not need significant bandwidth but must be reliable, compliant with data protection regulations, and not use too much device battery power
• Emerging applications like telesurgery ideally require latency of less than 200 ms for precision and safety
If the network can’t meet these requirements, there are worrying implications for quality of care, the ability of staff to do their jobs effectively, and even for patient survival rates.
Security and Compliance Are Growing Challenges
Healthcare is an attractive target for cyber attackers, since the personal information it holds on patients is valuable for identity theft and fraud. According to IBM, healthcare has had the highest data breach costs of any sector for more than a decade, and the cost of an average breach in 2025 was $7.2 million.
The rise of digitized health records and the explosion of devices connected to the network means there are now many potential vulnerabilities and endpoints to secure. Many healthcare organizations are still relying on outdated security systems that can’t cope with this complexity, leaving IT and security teams stretched to the limit trying to keep up with patches, alerts, and new threats.
This situation leaves healthcare organizations vulnerable to attacks and makes it hard to comply with data protection and cybersecurity regulations like HIPAA in the US and GDPR and NIS2 in Europe. It also means that security becomes a limitation to the adoption of the new technologies that are beginning to show value in improving patient care and efficiency.
Networking Needs to Be Ready for Tomorrow’s Care
Healthcare organizations, then, are already seeing the value of new technological developments to help them catch conditions earlier, provide more effective care, and be more operationally efficient. But legacy networks struggle to provide the performance and security that’s needed for new tech to show its true worth, and this could have literally life-or-death consequences.
In our next blog on this topic, we’ll take a look at what healthcare organizations should be demanding of their networks so they can build adaptable, innovative care models even as patient needs and expectations continue to grow.