Doctors and Engineers Map Out What 6G Must Deliver for Tomorrow’s Hospitals

The sixth generation of wireless communication, widely expected to arrive commercially around 2030, is currently being defined in standardization processes that will run until roughly 2028 or 2029. Those technical debates are dominated by engineers chasing higher data rates, lower latency and better reliability. What has been largely missing from the conversation is the voice of the people who would actually use the technology: physicians, medical device manufacturers and health IT specialists. A new qualitative study from a large German research consortium, published in the International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, set out to close that gap by interviewing fifteen healthcare stakeholders about what they hope 6G will deliver, and what genuinely worries them about it.

The research team, drawn from the University of Leipzig, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Charité in Berlin, SurgiTAIX AG, Vodafone’s Tech Innovation Center in Dresden and RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, conducted semi-structured interviews between August 2023 and May 2025. Participants came from clinical fields including anesthesiology, cardiology, internal medicine, pulmonology and sleep medicine, as well as from the medical technology and health IT sectors. Each interview lasted between 32 and 47 minutes, followed the COREQ reporting checklist for qualitative research, and was transcribed with OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition system. For the analysis, the researchers used a combined deductive-inductive thematic approach, employing the Llama 3.1 8B Instruct language model to generate preliminary transcript summaries that were then manually reviewed and corrected against the original recordings. Five initial categories came from the interview guide itself, and three more emerged from the data.

The starting point of the study is a sobering diagnosis of the present. Even before 6G arrives, hospitals struggle with insufficient interoperability, fragmented IT systems and unreliable network coverage. Devices are frequently tethered by cables, data must often be moved by hand between incompatible systems, and documentation consumes time that clinical staff, working under chronic shortages, do not have. These problems matter because the demographic shift between patients and practitioners is intensifying, making efficiency gains from digital transformation not a luxury but a necessity. Remote health solutions, automation and artificial intelligence all depend on communication networks capable of moving massive data volumes in real time with guaranteed reliability.

Against that backdrop, the stakeholders’ expectations for 6G are strikingly concrete. They anticipate higher data rates, ultra-low latency, broader coverage, the capacity to connect vastly more devices simultaneously, enhanced encryption and lower energy consumption. In practical terms, they envision real-time transmission of vital signs, imaging data and other medical information supporting live consultations, remote diagnostics and tele-supervision in operating rooms and emergency departments. Continuous home-based monitoring could accelerate clinical decision-making and improve patient safety. They also see 6G as a driver of workflow optimization: standardized device communication, mobile ward rounds, integrated patient and equipment tracking, and automated documentation assisted by large language models. Improved connectivity, they argue, is essential for efficient hospital operations and optimal resource allocation.

The study drilled into three specific use cases. The first involves artificial heart systems such as mobile ventricular assist devices, where stakeholders demand maximum fail-safety, reliable alarms and stable data transmission supported by proactive network monitoring and seamless coverage beyond hospital walls. They stressed transparency with patients about network stability and ensuring emergency connectivity with ambulance services, but flagged unresolved liability questions when automated systems fail. The second covers augmented and virtual reality applications, viewed positively for training and surgical support, though participants worried about distraction and information overload in daily practice. The third is smart hospital tracking: asset and material tracking drew broad enthusiasm for efficiency gains, patient tracking was deemed useful in specific scenarios such as surgical logistics, fall prevention and dementia care, but staff tracking was predominantly regarded critically, touching a raw nerve about surveillance in the workplace.

The concerns expressed were equally pointed. Data protection and privacy emerged as the single most critical challenge, encompassing fears of data misuse, cyberattacks and ambiguous patient consent for data use, along with skepticism about centralized data storage. Some participants found the European GDPR overly restrictive for medical innovation, while others defended strict local data handling and access controls. Responsibility and liability in the context of increasing automation and AI-supported decision-making remain unsolved, and stakeholders called for a clear framework defining who is accountable when technical malfunctions occur. There was also anxiety about technological dependency itself: if practitioners lose the skills to treat patients without technical assistance systems, any system shutdown could degrade care quality. Manual backup procedures, paradoxically, were seen as necessary to sustain trust in automated ones.

Acceptance, the study found, is deeply individual and hinges less on the technology itself than on perceived usefulness and honest communication of benefits. Reactions ranged from outright rejection to enthusiastic adoption, largely determined by reliability. Key barriers included limited transparency, poor communication and restrictive regulation, with misinformation amplifying uncertainty. Notably, many interviewees worried more about user errors caused by complex, unintuitive interfaces than about external cyberattacks, particularly under staff shortage and time pressure. This led to a strong emphasis on intuitive system design, redundancy for monitoring and diagnostic systems, and graceful degradation that preserves essential functionality during failures. Stakeholders also prioritized low latency over raw bandwidth for timing-critical scenarios such as remote surgery and remote control, and demanded deterministic, real-time communication with immediate alerts and automated emergency responses during network outages.

Synthesizing these findings, the authors derived five recommendations for technology providers. Interoperability comes first: open interfaces, shared data models and transparent standards are needed to end redundant documentation and proprietary lock-in. Second, network coverage and reliability are prerequisites for everything else, including robust connectivity in rural areas where telemedicine is growing; as one participant put it, the infrastructure must guarantee a stable and fast connection outside major cities. Third, awareness and trust must be actively built through transparent, comprehensible information about functionality, limitations and risks, coupled with clear explanations of system behavior during failures. Fourth, usability must be a central design criterion, adaptable to varying levels of technical proficiency. Fifth, technological performance must be balanced against sustainable energy use, because, as one technical stakeholder observed, it would be impractical if every device required an additional power bank. Continuous real-time monitoring can drain battery-powered sensors, so power-aware scheduling must be weighed against clinical needs for uninterrupted data transmission.

Ultimately, the study frames the hospital of the future not as a hyper-connected machine but as a resilient, people-centered ecosystem in which technology serves as an enabler of care. The authors emphasize that purely technical performance metrics, such as higher data rates or lower latency, only matter when they solve real clinical problems. The introduction of 6G should be understood as a co-evolutionary process between technology and healthcare practice, requiring ongoing dialog and co-design; as one physician put it, clinical users should develop more IT skills while IT developers should spend more time in clinics. The researchers acknowledge limitations: the LLM-assisted analysis saved less time than expected due to validation overhead, demographic characteristics were not systematically collected, and all interviews took place within the German healthcare system, which may limit transferability. Future work should adopt a multicentric, international scope and extend beyond the hospital to general practitioners and emergency medical services. But the core message stands: if engineers want 6G to transform medicine, they must start listening to medicine now, while the standard is still being written.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perspectives on 6G technology requirements for healthcare and future hospitals

Article Title: Anticipating the hospital of the future: stakeholder perspectives on 6G technology requirements in health care

Article References: Schatz, A., Rüb, M., Hegermann, H., Hiddemann, M., Wieschebrock, D., Stegemann, D., Herbst, J., Lipps, C., Möllenhoff, C., Petzold, T., Irmer, R., Köhler, F., Rockstroh, M., Pabst, T., Neumuth, T., Schotten, H. D., & Treskatsch, S. (2026). Anticipating the hospital of the future: stakeholder perspectives on 6G technology requirements in health care. International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-026-03776-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11548-026-03776-z

Keywords: 6G, smart hospitals, healthcare, interoperability, telemedicine, clinical workflows, data protection, network reliability, medical technology, artificial intelligence, remote monitoring, standardization