Wi-Fi's Increasingly Valuable Role in the Business of Healthcare

And JCAHO likes it too...the system monitoring itself instead of a requiring a human to walk around and monitor IT systems...great resource for the IT/IS staff so they can focus on other areas...BD

A hot market And Rutanen says hospitals are getting the picture--Ekahau, he says, is currently rolling out two to three hospitals a week. That’s a huge increase from a year ago. Rutanen says the major shift happened this past summer, largely thanks to the endorsement of RTLS by larger providers in the healthcare space like McKesson and Siemens Medical.
While VoWi-Fi and access to medical records are well-established wireless applications in many hospitals, Schatt says RTLS is the next big thing. And he notes that deploying RTLS for equipment tracking is easy to cost-justify: at least 15 percent of healthcare equipment is regularly declared missing and re-ordered, when it’s really just in another part of the hospital. Schatt says upgrading to 802.11n will also be key in the coming years, both to avoid interference with 2.4 GHz equipment and to make it easier to transmit large files.
“A lot of doctors’ offices have been set up on the peripherals of major hospitals, so x-rays are being transmitted across the parking lot to the doctors’ offices--and these files are pretty large,” he says. “If your blood pressure gets above a certain level, it can automatically generate a text message that’s delivered to the caregiver who’s responsible for you as a patient, and that message is displayed on the Vocera badge,” he says.