>Despite these fiscal requirements, St. Vincent’s has extended the wireless network to cover the entire hospital, including the wing housing doctors’ offices (already wired for Ethernet connections). Memorial originally planned on having 802.11b wireless access in just a few locations that were difficult to wire or where staff was very mobile, such as in patient wards, but Wolanyk argued that it made more sense to make the entire hospital wireless—including the parking structures and cafeterias—so that doctors and nurses can access information anywhere.

Deployment Hurdles

Deploying wireless laptops has its challenges. Here’s a rundown:

1. Battery life. Surprisingly, security and network management don’t top the list. Battery life does, whether that means a laptop, a PDA or tablet computer. "It’s hard to replace batteries a lot—charge, drain, recharge," notes OSU’s Thomas. Worse, staff members tend not to notify IT if a laptop battery is drained or if the computer is not working, since the laptops are shared with 40 other users and thus no one’s direct responsibility. To encourage staff members to plug notebooks into outlets to be recharged, OSU will raise the outlets’ height as it remodels units, he says.

Battery life is also an issue for PDAs, which usually can’t be plugged in to recharge. Still, says St. Vincent’s Stettheimer, some physicians take them and live with the four-hour battery times.

2. Security and network management. The typical IT concerns of security and network management are largely handled by the current generation of wireless routers and gateways. "Wide area wireless doesn’t require that much expertise. The device is doing the network implementation," notes Mark Lowenstein, head of consultancy Mobile Ecosystem.

That doesn’t mean hospitals simply plug in access points. Instead, they connect access points via wireless routers such as those from Bluesocket, Cisco Systems, ReefEdge and Vernier Networks, as well as use management software such as those from Wavelink and XcelleNet. And they implement a host of access controls: virtual LANs, policies for user IDs and passwords, authentication tools such as MAC addresses (the unique media access control ID for each device on a network), the 802.1x wireless authentication standard, and basic key-oriented encryption such as the wired equivalency protocol (WEP). Some hospital network managers also use intrusion detection software and hardware.