Improving Hospital patient care through fixed and
wireless LAN technologies

Rui J. M. M. C. Gomes – rui@gomes.com
CIO, Hospital S. Sebastião – Sta. Maria da Feira, Portugal,
CINTESIS-Medical School University, Porto, Portugal
Friday, March 2 1, 2008

1. The Situation

The last ten years has seen a rapid increase in the quantity of technology used in healthcare environments. A small number of Hospitals today would live on without a data network in place for communication and sharing resources for clinical and business applications for Hospital management.

Nevertheless, many Hospitals are finding that their existing technology can no longer support daily activities. Hospital de São Sebastião in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal acknowledged for its continual innovation, delivers high quality care to a community of 360,000 inhabitants with about 400 beds and 1500 employees.

This institution has a recognized commitment to quality, respect for the individual, teamwork and performance and what concerns costumer needs the Hospital wanted that his health professionals to have anytime access to high-bandwidth medical images and data, no matter where they were located inside or abroad. As soon as the Hospital were aware that secure wired and wireless access around the area could enable much faster and improved medical care with collaborative medical applications, decided to increased the network bandwidth to have the capacity to allow both this and other critical activities to take place at the same time.

2. The solution

To deliver and implement a wired and wireless gigabit Ethernet network, across the organization, the Hospital decided for a reputable supplier, like Nortel Networks, to help and transform communications  in the long term since there was a believe that this provider could offered one of the safest transitions to the most reliable technology available on the market. The reliable business continuity plan required for a modern Hospital network is delivered now by a highly robust switched cluster based on the Routing Switch Nortel 8600. The clustering technology ensures active resilience and no single point-of-failure, thereby protecting the Hospital's existing and future investment in critical applications and services.

The switches offer both Gigabit capability to the desktop and Power over Ethernet (POE), the latter being vital for powering our wireless LAN access points and IP video cameras or other terminals.

The institution now benefits from a high-speed links from these switches to the core, supporting widespread 10/100/1000 desktop connectivity vital for accessing and exchanging medical data.

For example inside Inpatient Services such as Emergency, Orthopedics, Surgery and Internal Medicine the institution enable daily basis real mobile access for accessing clinical records and radiology exams by means such tablet and pocket PCs on the patient's visits. For that connectivity the Hospital deployed the WLAN Security Switch and WLAN Access Point  managed by the Nortel WLAN Management Software .

Finally, in order that medical staff has highly secure wireless coverage across the Hospital grounds, the institution is using 120 access points all over the area and a based Security Switch with quality of service (QoS) to enabled and a policy-based provisioning, which is vital to ensure only authorised personnel to have access to sensitive and confidential data.

3. Outcomes

The main benefits achieved, furthermore wired connections, was the possibility for most advanced mobility delivering increasing productivity, efficiency and team collaboration since the professionals are able to use wireless pocket PC and Tablet PC, at Inpatient an Emergency services when visiting and collecting data from patients using Medtrix EPR, an Electronic Patient Record, developed by the Hospital to the Hospital ( www.medtrixepr.com )

With the synergy obtained by an excellent network environment and a robust, friendly and reliable medical record solution they are proud for achieving the following benefits:

• Efficiency - Quick access to validated electronic laboratory and RX examinations and clinical reports.

90% of doctors are using and benefiting from the Electronic Medical Record potential to access laboratory and RX examinations and 15% of nursing employees are using and benefiting from the Electronic Nurse System.

 • Productivity - Reduction of time spent in consultancy and time spent with administrative tasks (i.e. filling and managing requisitions) and dealing with Electronic Patient Record, prescribing and reporting treatments. One of the significant indicators measured was concerning the time reductions spend on Outpatient appointments.

 • Quality - Reduction of communication time between departments (medical orders and results delivery) and avoidance of erroneous or redundant information when filling patient associated information.

4. Conclusions

The Hospital benefits now from a highly available fixed and wireless network, which allows health professionals staff to access data from any Hospital area.  Is possible for the health professionals to have fast X-ray images access from the radiology department and share exams with other Hospital specialists. Some specialties such as neurosurgery are dealt with by one of our partner Hospitals in the local area. Through the high bandwidth and QoS, we can rapidly share neurosurgical data and radiology images without causing a network bottleneck. Additionally, health professionals can use the new wireless network to retrieve the same kinds of information via handheld devices and tablet PCs. Currently, they are working with academy and nearby suppliers of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies with WLAN enabled, for both medical staff and patients to be tracked around the building. Tracking progress of emergency and non-emergency patients can be hard in a busy Hospital and RFID will enable the professionals to know the precise location of any patient or other asset and any doctor at any time, preventing staff from wasting valuable time paging physicians, and searching the building.

The last but not least important issue concerns the possibility of using wireless VoIP across the building in order to save costs and boost productivity. In fact, the hospital is aware that in the near future it is a must the use of WLAN to connect everything (access to patients, laptops, desktop computers, telephony and more) granted by a  infrastructure designed to support the next generation of highly secure access Hospital communications.

5. References

1] CASE STUDY – Forward Thinking Hospital Boosts Productivity and Potencial Through Fixed and Wireless Rough Fixed and Wireless Technology, Nortel Networks, 2007

2] CASE STUDY - Hospital São Sebastião Moves Towards Patient-Centric Healthcare With Development Tools, Microsoft Corp. , 2005

3] MEDTRIX EPR Portal, www.medtrixEPR.com , on 20 March 2008