As Mary Douglas¹ moves through Machu Picchu, she feels her pain subside. After years of suffering following a serious stroke, the sights offer a welcome distraction, a chance to get lost in the beauty of the world around her. Like most vacations, Mary’s trip to Peru ends too soon, but in all other ways, Mary’s trip to Peru is extraordinary. It involves no plane tickets and no hotels. It takes only five minutes, and she doesn’t even have to leave her bed. Today, all it takes is a headset preloaded with Machu Picchu virtual reality (VR) content. Eventually, patients like Mary will be able to tour new places in the world every day using a fast, powerful 5G connection delivering immersive high resolution or “4K” travel experiences to their bedrooms.

Mary’s trip is part of a pioneering collaboration between Vitas® Healthcare, the nation’s leading provider of hospice care, and AT&T Business, to deliver life-altering service directly to patients in their own homes. The benefits of the Vitas-administered VR therapy using AT&T mobile connectivity can be significant: after just two 5 minute “trips” to destinations like Machu Picchu and an English garden, Mary’s pain drops from a 10 all the way down to a 2 and stays that way for hours.² Vitas Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joseph Shega was in the room that day. He said the positive effect on Mary went beyond her pain score, “You could see a visual change in her posture and her facial expressions” he says, “and she relaxed during the encounter.” After her VR sessions, Mary is able to nap into the afternoon, her first good sleep in several months. “That was one of the most powerful experiences I've had as a clinician.”

For Mary and other patients like her, confined to their beds at home or in elder care facilities and hospitals around the country, this augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) technology can offer welcome relief from pain. For the healthcare industry at large, the early success of the VITAS pilot program points to the coming impact of 5G technology.

“Care is moving outside of the four walls of the hospital and closer and closer to the patient’s home,” says Vitas CIO Patrick Hale. And while Vitas has already made investments in mobility using 4G technology, Hale says that “5G will be transformational for us.”

For hospice care providers like Vitas, the benefit of 5G networks is crystal clear - 80% of their care is already provided in patients’ homes. The same 5G technology that will allow Vitas to deliver immersive 4K virtual reality into patients’ homes will also let doctors increase their impact, expand their reach, and offer new kinds of care.

While 66% of healthcare providers³ are already offering or developing telemedicine programs, the increased speed and lower latency of 5G eventually will promote more widespread adoption of telehealth solutions—and give providers confidence that they can continue to offer telehealth to more patients.

With the advent of 5G, providers can also implement more sophisticated and effective remote monitoring technology. The current generation of remote monitoring tech is limited by the ability of the network to handle data. The same increased bandwidth that will eventually allow patients like Mary to stream 4K visuals from bed will allow remote care workers to monitor vital signs, track medications and access other important medical data in near real-time. The end result: the potential for better care.

5G’s impact isn’t limited to remote and outpatient healthcare scenarios. Doctors working in hospital settings can benefit tremendously from 5G. In hospital settings, clinicians are often asked to make split-second decisions. Access to accurate, near real-time data about a patient can be lifesaving. 5G using millimeter wave spectrum will allow clinicians to perform diagnostics at higher speeds, quickly and more intuitively access electronic medical records, and transfer medical images and other large files. At a time when hospitals are relying more heavily on data analysis and artificial intelligence to deliver quality of care to their patients, 5G will eventually give staff access to the increased compute power they need to realize the full potential of these new technologies.

For Zee Hussain, Senior Vice President Global Business – Finance, Healthcare, and Industry Solutions at AT&T Business, the collaboration with Vitas Healthcare is an outgrowth of the overall AT&T network strategy. That strategy began with the “investment in making the AT&T network the first in the U.S. to achieve standards-based mobile 5G,” he says—north of $160 billion from 2014 to 2019—and extends into the company’s focus on innovation. AT&T has created six foundries across the globe dedicated to building an ecosystem of real-world solutions on top of its network. The Vitas Healthcare VR trial grew out of time spent in the AT&T Foundry in Houston, which is dedicated exclusively to healthcare. “As part of the process,” Hussain says, “the Vitas team explored the idea of virtual reality for distraction therapy.”