# How 5G Wireless (and Concomitant Technologies) Will Revolutionize Healthcare?
## 1 Introduction
In the healthcare system, someone makes choices (e.g., a doctor); someone else is a consumer and user (e.g., patient); and someone else altogether pays (e.g., the insurer or the government via taxpayers). The Institute of Medicine (IoM), a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), summarized the ills of the US healthcare system as follows:  
_If banking were like health care, automated teller machine (ATM) transactions would take not seconds but perhaps days or longer as a result of unavailable or misplaced records. If home building were like health care, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers each would work with different blueprints, with very little coordination. If shopping were like health care, product prices would not be posted, and the price charged would vary widely within the same store, depending on the source of payment. If automobile manufacturing were like health care, warranties for cars that require manufacturers to pay for defects would not exist. As a result, few factories would seek to monitor and improve production line performance and product quality. If airline travel were like health care, each pilot would be free to design his or her own preflight safety check, or not to perform one at all [2]._  
While the point of the charge sheet above is certainly not that healthcare should function precisely in the way that other industries do, indeed each industry is different from others, however, the point is that the banking, construction, retailing, automobile manufacturing, flight safety, public utilities and personal services have developed certain best practices in terms of quality assurance, accountability and transparency that the healthcare industry should also incorporate. More than anything else, the healthcare industry needs to be reoriented so that the patient becomes the core concern of the system. In such patient-centric healthcare, the individuals will be empowered with information, and preferences for the convenience of patients will automatically be incorporated. Furthermore, payment incentives should be redesigned so that outcomes and values are rewarded with a less volume of procedures. Finally, with this transparent system, errors will be promptly identified and corrected. In this way, a data-driven approach will become routine allowing for continuous improvement through reflections on past and evidence-based healthcare decisions. In this paper, we show how 5G (and other concomitant technologies such as IoT, big data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)) has the potential to revamp a healthcare system struggling to cope with the burden of modern diseases and the challenge of scaling up to ever-increasing populations. In the future, ML algorithms will estimate appropriate micro-dosages of drugs (e.g., it may be used to administer insulin dosage through an implanted pump) and detect anomalies that might be forwarded to human experts who can manage the medical problems. Telemedicine or e-Health will allow scaling up of healthcare systems to meet a rising population, especially in remote, rural and low-income areas, by employing technologies such as remote consultation and surgery. Surgeons using telemedicine will have access to haptic feedback, which will allow for the feeling of touch to be transmitted. Patients will be able to measure their own vitals at a fraction of the cost and with great convenience. We believe that the 5G network will address not only personal communications, but also create a fully-digital society in which sensors may be embedded in tissue (pacemaker), ingested (using ingestible smart pills), printed on skin (using epidermal sensors such as smart skin or digital tattoo) and worn (using wearable technology such as smart clothing, smart jewellery or smartwatch). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that discusses how 5G-enabled healthcare systems, armed with other technologies such as AI, ML, big data, IoT, will enable a future healthcare revolution.