July 2024, more than a third of US hospitals experienced measurable network disruptions within hours. Of the services affected, nearly 22% were patient-facing – electronic health records, imaging platforms, staff portals for viewing patient data, and patient scheduling systems went offline simultaneously. Some facilities reported service outages exceeding 48 hours.
This wasn’t a cyberattack. It was a routine update gone wrong – a stark example of the extent to which modern healthcare has become reliant on digital infrastructure, and how fragile that infrastructure often is.
From paramedics transmitting patient vitals to rural clinics conducting tele-ICU consultations with specialists hundreds of kilometres away, connecting to the internet has become imperative to clinical delivery. Yet in the Middle East and emerging markets, network resiliency is still a dangerous blind spot. Most healthcare organisations approach connectivity as an IT procurement problem – something to buy, install and forget. This works, until it doesn’t.
The question facing healthcare leaders today is not if their networks will be disrupted, but how their infrastructure will react when disruption occurs.
The World Economic Forum projects a shortage of 10 million healthcare workers worldwide by 2030. In the Middle East and Africa, this shortage is particularly acute in rural regions where specialists concentrate in urban centres.
Reliable connectivity is a direct substitute for this scarcity. Remote consultations enable specialists to be consulted on important decisions in remote facilities, without needing to travel. Saudi Arabia’s Seha Virtual Hospital now links over 170 hospitals via telemedicine – allowing patients living in remote regions to get specialist medical care that would otherwise be a long journey or not at all. Training is possible at scale when healthcare workers can take part in live sessions with experts at leading institutions. Remote patient monitoring expands every clinician’s reach, so one specialist can monitor dozens of patients in a variety of facilities.
In situations where demand invariably exceeds supply, connectivity isn’t simply an infrastructure – it’s a force multiplier.
Much of the healthcare digitalisation in the region is based on single-path connectivity – usually a single fibre or cellular connection with a back up, with the same underlying infrastructure. This creates correlated risk where if one fibre trunk line is cut by a construction crew both can fail at the same time.
The clinical consequences are real:
For mission critical applications, even short term outages are clinically risky. A sixty-second gap in connectivity in ambulance transport means outmoded data for the receiving physician. A five minute outage to a rural clinic could terminate a specialist consultation in the middle of the diagnosis.
Satellite connectivity provides a network path that is truly independent. Unlike terrestrial networks, satellite links are not affected by local infrastructure failures, cable cuts or ground level congestion. The most recent generation of low-earth orbit (LEO) constellations has changed what satellites can offer – latency has been drastically shortened, and the amount of bandwidth has increased. For healthcare use cases previously thought to only be applicable on the ground, satellite has been rendered viable.
But satellite isn’t the answer all by itself. Bandwidth costs are still higher than terrestrial alternatives and the weather can impact the quality of signals. The solution is an intelligent combination of satellite with existing fibre and cellular via software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN treats multiple connectivity paths as a single, policy-managed network. Rather than having competing networks with manual failover, SD-WAN continuously monitors performance and routes traffic based on clinical priorities.
The quantified value is significant. In enterprise IT, “five nines” availability (99.999% uptime) is considered the gold standard – translating to roughly five minutes of unplanned downtime annually, compared to hours or days with single-path architectures. SD-WAN with redundant links makes this target achievable. Automated failover occurs in under 30 seconds, whereas traditional manual procedures take between 5-15 min assuming IT staff are immediately available to perform procedures.
In practice, a tele-ICU consultation could typically make use of low-cost fibre but would seamlessly switch to satellite in the event of latency. An ambulance switches automatically from cellular to satellite as it travels through different areas of variable coverage – without human intervention.
Companies such as Sama X are already assisting healthcare providers to implement this model at scale throughout the Middle East. By ensuring satellite connectivity via Starlink to clinics, ambulances, and temporary medical units – in conjunction with the terrestrial networks via SD-WAN – Sama X allows facilities to continue their operations when the local infrastructure fails.
For healthcare organisations considering network architecture, the basic transformation is understanding connectivity as clinical infrastructure, and not IT support. Just as hospitals invest in backup power generation, they need to invest in network resilience.
Healthcare leaders should now be asking: What happens when our primary network fails? What is the patient impact from a one-hour outage? Do our backup systems actually offer independence or do they share failure modes with our primary connection?
The facilities that will deliver consistent, high quality care over the next decade will be the ones that take the same rigour with their network as their clinical equipment: redundant, resilient, and designed for the times when failure is not an option.
