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Wi Fi in Healthcare Industry

More often than not, working in a hospital is like racing against time. Every minute delayed is a minute lost and in the case of patient care and case treatment, a minute may prove just a bit too late.

There’s never a second to waste or a moment to lose. Every single employee is working against the clock. Everything is in constant flux. Motion is the word that hospital workers such as doctors, nurses and other staff members live by. The need for speedy transactions, for effective communications, is of course obvious in such conditions. This is why hospitals also make for such an ideal place to install Wi Fi networks at. The ABI Research analyst Stan Schatt supports this observation, citing 6,161 hospitals out of the 7,526 in the U.S. that already have Wi-Fi networks deployed at present.

The most well-known and well-used applications, Schatt states, includes voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) as well as wireless access to any number of patient records. Latest additions on-board are the wireless hotspots provided for patients as well as visitors, wireless transmission of prescriptions that comes directly from the examining room to the pharmacy. In addition, real time location systems (RTLS) well and able to track everything from doctors to equipment are also part of the package.

In one of the latest reports filed for ABI—one that went by the title Wi-Fi Real-Time Location Systems—Schatt estimated that Wi-Fi RTLS will grow to an $800 million market by the time 2012 comes rolling in. This, in turn, will make it possible for revenue that is generated from healthcare purchases of Wi-Fi RTLS equipment to exceed by a wonderful $264 million. In a similar vein, Research firm Frost & Sullivan also forecasts a similar, though slightly more optimistic, scenario, with the latter expressing confidence in the belief that the global RTLS market will eventually surge to $1.26 billion by the time 2011 arrives.

Exciting Times for the Market Ahead

While VoWi-Fi and access to medical records via wireless applications are relatively new and inchoate as a way of communication,  set-ups of this sort—of Wi Fi cordless phones and Wi Fi networks—are already being deployed in quite a number of hospitals at this time. On the subject, Schatt expresses that while RTLS is still a new technology, it is already on its way to becoming one of the major communication technologies in the healthcare industry. In addition, he takes particular note of how deploying RTLS for equipment tracking is remarkably simple and painless to cost-justify.

One example is how 15percent of healthcare equipment that is declared missing and re-ordered from time to time is, in all actuality, simply languishing in another place of the hospital. 15 percent or not, it would be much, much better if such misplacement miseries were kept from happening at all. Schatt muses that upgrading the hospital’s communications to 802.11n will also be important in the years to come. The move will, after all, be able to allow the hospital’s communication network to avoid interference woes with 2.4 GHz equipment. Also, there is the added advantage of easy and faster file transfers. Because the system is engineered to handle such transactions, transmitting behemoth files won’t have to cause problems on a major scale as well.

“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.

And to guarantee secure transmissions per HIPAA regulations, Schatt observes that intrusion prevention systems are a crucial part of the package. This, of course, is a welcome bit of good news for companies who set out to offer tech users with just such systems.

“HIPAA is the best friend for intrusion detection systems from AirMagnet, AirDefense, and AirTight Networks, [which] have developed extensive reporting mechanisms that provide exactly the kinds of audit reports that HIPAA requires,” he states.