More than 30 hospitals in China, together with China Association of Medical Equipment (CAME) have joined forces with China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and Huawei to establish China’s first 5G Hospital Network Standard.
The 5G Hospital Network Standard will be the technical guidance that the medical institutes and the telecom enterprises have come together and cooperated to develop in the 5G+ Medicine space, Huawei said in a release.
The vendor said that this is a clear indication that “5G technologies are at the heart of the next generation of China’s medical infrastructure networks.” This project will focus on the 5G-based telemedicine applications, Huawei said.
The main aim of the initiative is to “fully understand the 5G network capabilities and network construction guidance,” which might help the hospitals to build future 5G networks.
Nie Chunlei, Chief of the National Health Commission (NHC) of China’s primary care healthcare department, said: “The Internet + medical development at the primary level requires a well-calibrated top-down design and implementation to ensure healthy, standardized growth. The standard will be developed based on the successful experience of previous programs and combines the wisdom of medical and communication experts to effectively apply 5G in hospitals. As part of the infrastructure of information-driven primary healthcare, it will accelerate the Internet+ medical development, improve primary healthcare to become more convenient, accessible, and helpful to the people.”
“With the strong support of 5G, Internet medical care have witnessed much progress this year, with a number of mature 5G healthcare solutions being unveiled,” said Liu Wenxian, deputy director of NHC’s Development Planning and Information Department. “This further underlines the necessity of national policies to support scaled medical applications integrated with radio communication solutions. At present, established in cooperation with communication service providers, this standard will better enable us to address the current principal contradiction in China’s medical systems, and implement the Internet + medical program aimed at improving service provisioning in major hospitals.”
China Mobile also highlighted that the carrier is launching the 5G+ program, aiming to cooperate with medical institutions and other industry partners to develop 100 demonstration applications for vertical industries.
“Under the direction of the National Health Committee, we have successfully initiated the setup of a healthcare-dedicated big data company to focus on the business operations of big data applications for Internet medical services through joint collaboration with many other partners concerned,” a China Mobile executive said.
“Huawei began 5G+ healthcare research in 2016,” said Zhang Wenlin, president of the Corporate Strategy Department at Huawei. “Since then, Huawei has built hundreds of 5G+ healthcare pilot projects based on our 5G indoor solution. Now, we have already contributed to the commercial implementation of many healthcare applications, including telemedicine (MDT cares), imaging tele-diagnosis, ECG tele-diagnosis, ultrasonic diagnosis, and training online.”
He added: “This standard is fundamental to developing a robust industry ecosystem and accelerating the maturity of the industry. We are confident that the standard will promote the digital transformation in the medical industry and play an important role in assuring quality and safety while encouraging scaled business growth. In the long term, the standard will benefit the overall improvement of medical technologies and services and facilitate Smart Hospital and better healthcare development of China.”