Connected devices are leaving controlled environments and showing up in ambulances, clinics, patients’ homes, and everywhere in between. They’re collecting data, communicating with platforms, and supporting care that depends on connectivity being available when it matters. Yet connectivity is often treated like a commodity.
Pick a carrier. Pick a SIM. Check the coverage map. Negotiate the price. Then move on.
That approach gets harder to maintain when your devices need to work for five, ten, or fifteen years. Because connectivity isn’t just a means to get a healthcare device online. It affects security, regulatory requirements, coverage, device lifecycle management, and what happens when today’s network isn’t the best network for tomorrow.
Connected Care Raises the Stakes
A connected medical device doesn’t operate in a perfectly controlled environment. It may move between coverage areas. It may need to work across borders. It may encounter outages or changes in network conditions. And if it’s deployed in a patient’s home, you can’t assume someone will be there to troubleshoot if connectivity fails. Security adds another layer.
Claroty’s Team82 analyzed 2.25 million connected medical devices across 351 healthcare organizations and found known exploited vulnerabilities affecting devices in 99% of the organizations studied. The takeaway isn’t simply that healthcare devices need stronger security; it’s that connectivity needs to be considered as part of the broader security architecture. And regulation is moving in the same direction as well. Cybersecurity requirements are increasingly part of the medical device conversation, with proposed changes to the HIPAA Security Rule pointing toward stronger expectations around encryption, asset inventories, risk management and more.
This is proof that connectivity may not be the most visible part of a connected care product, but it can influence almost everything underneath it.
The Coverage Map Isn’t the Whole Story
“Global coverage” sounds great on paper, but what happens when a carrier changes its network? When roaming isn’t the right option for a particular area? When a device needs to switch connectivity? When cellular coverage isn’t available? And who actually controls that change?
These questions rarely come up in a 50-device deployment. They matter a lot more at 50,000 devices. At scale, manually replacing SIMs, managing carrier relationships, or sending someone into the field to fix connectivity issues isn’t sustainable.
That’s why healthcare teams need to think beyond “Will it connect?” And rephrase that to “Can we control, secure, and adapt connectivity throughout the entire device lifecycle?”
The Connected Care Connectivity Checklist
Getting that answer means looking beyond network coverage and pricing. It means considering:
- Security: Can connectivity support the device’s security architecture?
- Regulatory fit: Can the connectivity model support the requirements across different markets?
- Coverage: What happens when a network isn’t available?
- SIM strategy: Can connectivity be managed remotely as requirements change?
- Device lifecycle: What happens five years from now?
- Operations: Can thousands of devices be managed without thousands of manual interventions?
These aren’t questions to save for deployment. They’re questions to answer before you choose your connectivity strategy.
The Connected Care Connectivity Guide
We put together The Connected Care Connectivity Guide to help healthcare teams navigate the complexities of the connectivity ecosystem.
Inside, you’ll find a practical framework for evaluating connectivity across security, regulation, coverage, SIM strategy, device design, operations, and more. Plus, you’ll get an RFP question bank and deployment guide to help you move from pilot to scale.
