While attending the annual health conference ViVE in Los Angeles and exploring new developments and trending topics in healthcare, Healthcare Innovation stopped by the Verizon booth to speak with Robin Goldsmith, practice leader for Healthcare, Insurance & Life Sciences.

When people hear "Verizon," their first thought isn’t usually about healthcare.

If you think about it, where healthcare has been, and where it's headed now, a lot of connectivity and devices, whether in a hospital or at home, are foundational to what Verizon does in this space.

I'm very privileged to get to work with our hospital system clients.

What are you currently observing in your area of work?

I joined six years ago during the pandemic, and I think the reason I joined is that I saw the need for access to devices and phones to engage in healthcare, including telemedicine. Those who did not have that were left behind.

I've seen just more and more of an acceleration of that. More devices are going into the home, this decentralization of care. There's this triage of patients being treated in their homes. Connectivity is foundational for remote patient monitoring, chronic care management, and remote therapeutic management — all programs that health systems need to be doing and that will move us toward this always-on healthcare state. We provide the foundational connectivity to do that.

What are some of your predictions for mobile technology in healthcare?

I think we're going to see more and more wearables. And I think, I mean, a good example is Oura’s partnership with Dexcom. I think that's a key indicator of a consumer device paired with a medical device. We'll see more wearables out of the need for care teams, doctors, and nurses wanting to have more frequent touchpoints with their patients, so they can get indications earlier. Wearables, on-the-go care — we're going to see more and more of that.

What I'm really excited about is the funding. There's a lot of buzz at the conference about the rural healthcare transformation funding, which is a good thing. The money's going to the states. Now, the health systems and care providers are going to apply for that money. I think rural healthcare needs it more than any place. People are driving long distances to get care. Rural hospitals are closing, so hopefully that money goes towards providing better access points into communities that don't have access to care.

A big proposition for us, and where we see the future at the connected hospitals, is really around installing more neutral host networks and private networks to enable things like virtual nursing and robotic surgery.

Think of a neutral host network as a set of radios where anyone with a cell phone can walk in and get access to their carrier, all three major ones. What's really interesting about it is that it also meets the need for coverage in the hospital. The second use case is private wireless network -- one infrastructure, it's modular. You can add a private wireless network, which has very high speed, low latency. You can put all the Apple iPhones running the Epic Rover app for nurses on that network. You can use it as a failover, for redundancy, business continuity. Large imaging files, things that need to move more in real time — that's how we're seeing a lot of use cases tied to that private wireless network.

We’re seeing Wi-Fi congested, and then clients looking to us to give them the optionality of a network. We're seeing a lot of traction there.

Is this more secure?

Cellular, in its DNA, is more secure than Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi was never designed to handle the load of the current use cases. Now, with AI and all this data flowing in massive volumes —Wi-Fi wasn't designed for that. It's built for guest Wi-Fi. It's not made for virtual nursing, moving large image files, video streaming. There's this densification of what's happening in healthcare systems; a lot of cameras, sensors, more devices, that need to connect to a network. Now, there’s this hybrid network approach that Verizon is pretty unique in being able to deliver.

We work with all the satellite providers. We're seeing satellites used in rural areas where no one has great coverage, and also in disaster areas like hurricanes, fires, when the network is impacted, and it needs a failover. We want to make sure that there's always connectivity for healthcare. Cool.

Could you speak to new and ongoing technological changes within healthcare?

We're seeing a lot of rapid adoption of AI. Healthcare needs it more than finance, retail, manufacturing, because we don't have enough nurses and doctors. I think they're really trying to adopt all these tools. And you look around this hall here at ViVE, and you see a lot of ambient listening companies.

We're now seeing that there's a huge need for automation. How can we give time back to the clinical teams and reduce the number of clicks they have to do in the EHR?

I think back office is being addressed first, and then we'll go to clinical applications, things like diagnostic radiology. Our role there is to have the infrastructure to enable that; to help move the massive amount of data that is AI. We're spending a lot of money on long-haul fibers across the United States. Our AI Connect program connects large data centers. It's a big focus for Verizon.

At the end of the day, Verizon is a connectivity provider, whether that is wireless or wired.

We just acquired Frontier Communications, so that's going to expand our footprint of fiber, which is really what enables a lot of this.

What is your advice for healthcare leaders?

I don't want to be presumptuous to advise healthcare leaders. We want to be a resource for them. It's evident that secure, reliable connectivity is critical and foundational for a lot of the things they want to do. We're one of the few partners that can do that well and have the history and teams to dig in. And what I'm excited about is how we can partner in a more strategic way to really get to what their challenges are and then connect what we have to bring to bear. From a technological and connectivity perspective, I think a lot of people don't see us that way. We want to be part of this conversation.