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Wi Fi in Healthcare Industry II

Consolidating networks

A global healthcare marketing lead for Aruba Networks, Peter Mongroo expresses that the ability to consolidate a hospital’s various networks also adds a great deal to make Wi-Fi a particularly inviting choice to entertain.

“Wireless cardiac monitoring solutions have been on proprietary networks in the past–and some of them still are–but we’re seeing some vendors deploying them on 802.11,” he states. “And that’s what I think most customers are looking for: one common infrastructure for all their applications.”

It is of course interesting to see how the increased use of Wi-Fi has directly led to quite a number of hospitals opting to go and integrate their information technology as well as biomedical engineering departments, Mongroo muses. From switching to any number of digital telephones—cordless phones, Wi-Fi phones, VoIP DECT phones—to choosing the ideal system that will ideally address the specific needs and concerns of a particular health care set-up, these hospitals are not only catching on, they are developing the technology even further as they discover new and relevant knowledge in how they could improve the way they work with the system. Adjustments are made and in line with this new information, a more informed action is readily deployed. That’s the new paradigm hospitals are working towards right now. And judging from the results from a number of institutions, the results are more than glowing.

“As we see these applications being deployed–clinical applications that were once the bailiwick of the biomedical engineers but are now being enabled by the IT infrastructure–you’re starting to see the necessary convergence of those two historical islands of information,” he adds.