At MWC 2025, we held the Digital Health Summit in collaboration with the GSMA. At the event, we explored the opportunities and the challenges in smart hospitals, IoT, direct-to-consumer services and AI in healthcare. This report outlines the key takeaways and insights from the summit.

Healthcare and digital health provides operators and vendors with a strong opportunity to verticalise

In this report, we dive into the B2B2X ecosystem role in developing, embedding and capturing the opportunities in the healthcare industry which grows increasingly connected. In our research, we believe that this ecosystem role include the following three aspects:

• Solutions and applications: highly customised end-to-end solutions and scalable applications. These include software, consulting and advisory services, systems integration and solution sales.
• Application enablement: aggregate applications and data from multiple partners to multiple users. Provide data management & sharing, billing/transactions, revenue management, marketplace.
• Network-as-a-service: manage custom networks in a cloud-like way, providing the ability for customer to scale up and down, define parameters (e.g., latency) and add additional functionality (e.g., security).

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Telcos are hoping to leverage emerging technologies (e.g., 5G, private networks) to drive growth within vertical industries

Enterprises are under pressure to cut costs and differentiate from the competition – and they see digital transformation as a necessary step to achieve this. Emerging technologies that are considered in this effort include edge computing, 5G, operational applications, AI, machine learning (ML), next-generation networks and the internet of things (IoT).

Emerging technology is driving a growing ecosystem of devices and use cases in B2B telecom, enabling operators to seek new areas of value beyond connectivity

Operators have begun to offer end-to-end digital health solutions – from NaaS through to SaaS

Table of contents

• Intro to connected health
• Smart hospitals
• Direct-to-consumer health propositions
• Health IoT
• AI in healthcare

Related research

• 5G: The next phase
• MWC 2025: A tech show, not a telecom one
• SMBs: How telcos should approach them
• Applying the platform mindset: STL Partners’ enterprise manifesto

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Author

Amy Cameron

Research Director

Amy works with world-leading operators and tech companies to define opportunities and strategies in the B2B and AI fields. She leads STL Partners’ research into application of AI in telecoms, as well as the Growing Enterprise Revenues research stream.