Towards 6G-Connected Healthcare: Perspectives, Risks and Real-World Applications for Smart Hospitals

The healthcare sector is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by demographic changes, rising costs, and a shortage of specialized staff. To tackle this, the next generation of wireless technologies, particularly Sixth Generation (6G), is offering transformative potential enabling seamless connectivity, Extended Reality (XR) telemedicine, and AI-assisted automation in medical environments from 2030 and beyond. As one of the first works of its kind, this paper draws a realistic vision of how 6G can empower the evolution of "smart hospitals", fostering efficiency, reliability, and accessibility in healthcare services. Therefore, 6G's technological fundamentals, multi-layer architecture, and expected features are described from the medical point of view. Also, an exemplary hospital treatment process illustrates how these advancements can be matched to current clinical demands, including i) location-based services, ii) intra-operative telemedicine, and iii) smart patient monitoring by Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This way, a foundation is laid for the subsequent definition of specific requirements for the development of 6G. Despite its ambitions, the adoption of 6G in healthcare raises critical concerns regarding economic efficiency, security, data privacy, regulatory compliance, and liability, which are being addressed by this work. By highlighting technical features, opportunities, and risks, this work offers a comprehensive overview targeted at medical professionals and clinical decision-makers. 6G holds the potential for necessary improvements regarding patient care, making high-quality healthcare more accessible, efficient, and adaptive to global needs, if done right.