Wireless Networks: Just What the Doctor Ordered
Wireless makes productivity sense whenever workers are mobile and work with time-critical data, says Chris Kozup, a Meta Group analyst. And, notes Kathryn Korostoff, president of consultancy Sage Research, the use of wireless can also relieve staff constraints. "Hospitals are always understaffed," she says. "In the face of economic hardship, wireless has a payback scenario. It’s not a huge amount of capital investment. They’re clearly saving time for doctors and nurses, which is their greatest asset." For the users, "it really becomes a part of their job satisfaction—it relieves stress. It has a major effect on how people are satisfied with their job," she adds.
However, wireless and mobile technologies have supported mission-critical needs only in the past few years, and hospitals deploying the new systems continue to wrestle with the best ways to deploy them and integrate them into their overall IT structure. While wireless network security has become a straightforward issue for CIOs to address, several other technology hurdles continue to require experimentation and greater heterogeneity than many IT departments would prefer to support.
Hospitals are early wireless adopters, and the issues they face and the benefits they achieve apply to any industry—professional services, retail, inventory warehouses—that has mobile workers within a building, Korostoff says.
At the Core: Laptops on Carts
Hospitals’ wireless deployments typically involve setting up 802.11b access points in patient wards, treatment facilities and in corridors in which patients travel. Wirelessly enabled laptops affixed to carts are rolled from bed to bed and ward to ward as needed so that doctors and nurses can access medical records and order tests and medications wherever they are.
Usually, these shared laptops complement existing wired desktops installed at nurses’ stations and other locations during earlier-generation attempts to digitize medical records. Wireless tablets and sometimes PDAs often supplement these laptops, either to provide staff with a dedicated device or for use in other medical activities.
Some hospitals keep the mix of devices limited, while others let doctors choose almost anything to encourage usage. "We have not found there is one perfect answer to how people access information: wired PCs, laptops on carts, tablets, PDAs," says St. Vincent’s CIO Stettheimer.
Consider four hospital deployments:
- OSU Medical Center has more than 1,100 medical staffers who care for 33,000 inpatients and 625,000 outpatients every year. It has set up 220 access points and 180 notebooks on carts. Although OSU hasn’t tracked its wireless costs separately, Enterprise Systems Director Phil Skinner figures it costs $600 per device—whether it’s a PDA, access point or wireless card—including setup, software and hardware.
- St. Vincent’s has a similar setup of 168 access points and 18 notebooks for its 600 medical staff members (on average, 40 people per day access the wireless network). The hospital cares for 19,000 inpatients and sees 140,000 outpatients every year. St. Vincent’s has three tablets dedicated to registration at patient beds, so patients don’t have to wait in a lobby, as well as 12 wireless notebooks used by technical and administrative staff.
This fall, St. Vincent’s will install an electronic order-entry system for physicians, which will be available over 100 wireless PDAs and 60 tablets, as well as more than 200 existing wired bedside computers. Stettheimer figures the wireless infrastructure cost about $1 million, out of the hospital’s $45 million investment in IT.
- Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Ill., a teaching hospital affiliated with Southern Illinois University, also took this route for its wireless deployment. The hospital, whose 550 physicians care for 22,000 inpatients and 450,000 outpatients, has about 150 access points for an initial six notebooks. CIO O.J. Wolanyk expects the number to grow dramatically after the first users talk about their experiences and as the hospital runs out of room for stationary terminals. The wireless system cost $900,000 out of the three-year, $30 million EMR effort.
- St. John’s Hospital, a block away from Memorial, is focused on using wireless handheld scanners to record medication delivery; patients’ wristbands, drug labels and nurses’ badges are all bar-coded. A nurse scans all three so that the system can immediately track which nurse gave which patient which medication at what time, says IS Director Gordon Lashmett. St. John’s is implementing a wireless system like Memorial’s while it also completes its EMR rollout.
$firstKeyword
Everything BlackBerry with tips, news and reviews from our mobility expert Al Sacco.
