Service Level Agreements for 5G-Enabled Healthcare Systems: Challenges and Considerations.

5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) communication networks, with their characteristics of increasing speed, connectivity, reliability, availability and capacity while reducing latency, have the potential to transform the healthcare sector by opening possibilities for novel healthcare use cases and applications. Service level agreements (SLAs) can help enable these new healthcare use cases by documenting the communication requirements, performance standards, and roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders involved in providing safe and effective 5G-enabled healthcare to patients. However, the peculiarities and nuances of 5G implementations give rise to gaps in this area that should be addressed to streamline the implementation of 5G technology in healthcare. This magazine article highlights the key challenges and describes open research questions related to SLAs for 5G-healthcare systems. Addressing the research challenges in this space will help in developing robust SLAs that can ensure that device manufacturers, network service providers, users, and regulatory authorities share a common framework to safely integrate 5G & B5G technology in healthcare.