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Wi Fi in Healthcare Industry III

Enjoying Better VoWi-Fi in Hospitals

With VoWi-Fi integrated into a considerable of hospital environments with ease, equipment providers are in a wonderful position to continue to find new and innovative means to set their offerings apart from the rest, thus effectively leaving the competition for dead. Take the Vocera Communications for one and how the company announced of late its new B2000 Communications Badge, with 802.11g, advanced encryption, anti-microbial technology, an OLED display, increased durability–and a Linux operating system. The combination of features is enough to make any tech adept squirm with excited, frustrated glee.

Still, while aware of the need to make its competitors bite the dust, Vocera executive vice president Brent Lang firmly expresses that his company’s value proposition remains the same: the point is to develop the level of efficiency in communication that users experience. That remains the first order of business.

“A user anywhere in the hospital can instantly get a hold of the person they need, just by saying their name or, more importantly, by saying their functional role–‘Call the on-call oncologist,’ ‘Call a transport tech,’ or ‘Broadcast to the emergency team,’” he states.

And it’s not all about voice either: the newest version of Vocera’s software, Lang observes, packs along APIs that are ideal for interfacing with key equipment in the same way as blood pressure monitors.

“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 explains.

Keeping Posted on People and Equipment

It’s when you combine the set-up allows for the fusion of VoWi-Fi with RTLS that the juice really gets going. RTLS equipment provider Ekahau announced lately of its partnership with Polycom. The arrangement will make it possible for location tracking on Polycom’s SpectraLink 8000 Series Wi-Fi handsets–letting a nurse not only to get to a doctor by phone—whether a cordless phone or corded unit— with less delay. This will also make it easier for the nurse to locate the exact of the doctor in question within the hospital so if emergency medical procedures need to be performed, contacting the doctor won’t cause any unnecessary problems.

Tuomo Rutanen, Ekahau’s vice president of business development, shares that cost is also another important selling point for RTLS.

“Now that you have Wi-Fi that can be used for multiple things, voice, data, video and so forth, RTLS is just a natural application that rides over that 802.11, and the cost to put in a location tracking system is a fraction of what it was ten years ago,” he explains.

And Rutanen adds that hospitals are getting the picture–Ekahau, he states, is currently rolling out two to three hospitals a week. That’s already a tremendous surge from a year ago. Rutanen expresses the major shift occurred this past summer, due to the endorsement of RTLS by larger providers in the healthcare space such as McKesson and Siemens Medical.

Thus, it won’t be long now before other hospitals follow suit. And while opting for a VoIP service or Wi Fi connection—including picking out which digital telephones or cordless phones to settle on—that perfectly suits the hospital will certainly be a difficult bit of business to handle, the IT departments of modern hospitals these days are already well-armed and well-prepared for the challenge, so much in fact that some are already raring to go.