St. Agnes Medical Center Picks Wavelink for End-To-End Management of Their Growing WLAN Infrastructure

Hospital adds coverage, extends wireless applications, and manages network security with Mobile Manager and Avalanche

Saint Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, California, is undergoing the largest expansion in its history. The 330-bed hospital, listed among the top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals in America (1999, 2001) and a seven-time winner of National Research Corporation´s Consumer Choice Award, is nearly doubling in size. The expansion includes a new home for the Saint Agnes Heart and Vascular Center, an Emergency Department double its current size and more than 100 additional private patient rooms.

To bring healthcare information right to each of those bedsides, Saint Agnes IT staff will extend a WLAN infrastructure that has proved its value over the past six years as it has grown to serve a variety of applications throughout the medical center campus. Saint Agnes uses Wavelink Mobile Manager and Avalanche to manage all the wireless devices on its rapidly evolving network.

"Doctors and nurses wanted to move the critical healthcare information closer to the bedside - closer to the point of care," says David Horsham, senior manager of network services for the hospital. "Initially, Saint Agnes saw this technology as a way to improve patient care by ensuring that the right patient gets the right dose of the right medication at the right time."

The hospital uses McKesson´s Acuscan-RX application with wireless Pocket PCs from Symbol to ensure proper medication protocols are followed. "The handheld devices we´re using have bar code scanners. We scan the barcode from the patient´s wristband. Then we scan the medication, and the system confirms that the medications are dispensed properly," says Horsham.

Back in 1997, Saint Agnes was an early adopter of wireless LAN technology when it started using Compaq laptops with wireless cards and access points from Proxim in the Emergency Department to provide more flexible, mobile access to the hospital network for patient records, charts and lab results. "It gives caregivers access to the information they need when and where they need it," says Horsham.

Today Saint Agnes uses wireless cards and access points from Cisco throughout its network, with Symbol PDAs, Compaq laptops, and Toshiba pen-tablets. The hospital network covers six buildings with wireless access currently provided in the main hospital (41 access points across six floors with over 100 Symbol PDAs), the Emergency Department (three access points with eight Compaq laptops), the Cancer Center (six access points with fifteen Toshiba pen-tablets) and the Administrative Plaza (currently two access points in two conference rooms for staff training). "We´ll easily grow to over 100 access points within the next two years," says Horsham. "In addition to the new Heart and Vascular Center, we expect to expand wireless coverage into our operating rooms, recovery rooms, and pre-operative holding area."

Central Administration Is Essential

"When we started rolling out the additional access points we recognized we needed some way of managing all these devices in our secure environment," says Horsham. "One of the ways we accomplish that is through MAC address authentication. The MAC address is the unique identifier of each device on the network. If that MAC address is not in our list of authorized devices, the device is not allowed on the network. So the challenge became how to manage that type of infrastructure. With Wavelink Mobile Manager and Avalanche we´re able to do that."

"Whenever we add a new laptop, we have to update every access point with the new laptop´s MAC address," Horsham explains. "Instead of having to Telnet to every single access point, we can use Wavelink to push the information from our central console on the fly. It would probably have taken us eight hours or more to update those access points individually. With Wavelink we can do it in minutes."

"Because we add, change, and remove mobile devices on the network all the time, we need to be able to update those MAC address lists very frequently. Central administration is the key to controlling costs in managing the growing network infrastructure we have," says Horsham. "We get a huge return on investment from the ability to centrally manage the wireless network. Once you deploy the devices, if something goes wrong, you don´t have to actually walk out to the device to fix it."

Saint Agnes Network Communication Engineer Phil Mandelbaum gives two examples.

"We recently changed the IP addresses for access points in the emergency room wireless system. I was able to change them and reboot the access points remotely from Mobile Manager´s central console at my desk. And if an access point goes down, Mobile Manager will email me. The other night we lost a laser amplifier for the fiber optic link between two of our buildings. Mobile Manger notified me that it had lost IP connectivity to the two access points in that building." Mandelbaum plans to install a Wavelink plug-in that will integrate Mobile Manager with HP Openview, the software SaintSt. Agnes uses to manage their wired network.

Managing Individual Devices with Avalanche

"The Avalanche product saves us lots of time in having to configure the Symbol device or tablet or laptop by providing a way for us to centrally push out information across the wireless network," says Horsham. "Mobile Manger manages the access points, but we also need to manage the hand-helds. With Avalanche, we can send all of those configuration items right to the individual PDA over the wireless infrastructure so that the device can join our network."

"We´re a quarter mile away from the hospital. Without a product like Avalanche, when something goes wrong with a PDA, we´d have to send someone to the device to reconfigure it. That´s very time consuming. With Avalanche we can push the configuration directly to the device from the central console," says Horsham.

Saint Agnes uses Mobile Manager and Avalanche together to update SSID and WEP keys across the wireless network for security. "I´m sure our new security officer will want us to change the WEP keys on our devices with greater frequency," says Horsham. "Avalanche will help us automate that task."

Using Profiles To Manage Network Performance

"I use Mobile Manager for managing access point profiles. Different buildings have different profiles," says Mandelbaum. "We use VLANS to segregate departments and locations for traffic management and security. I have six different profiles set up for different areas with different gateways, Domain Name Servers, WIN servers, and their subnet masks. We also have different models of Cisco access points - both 350s and 1200s. I have set up different profiles for each. With the click of a button I can change the configuration on a group of access points or a single access point."

Mandelbaum also uses Mobile Manager to monitor network usage and optimize performance. "I´ll bring up my Cancer Center profile to look at those access points. I´ll drill down on a specific access point to see what devices are associated with it. If I see that I have one access point that continually has a majority of the devices, then I know I need to adjust the neighboring access points to load-balance."

In the Cancer Center, doctors use the Toshiba pen tablets to view x-ray images from the McKesson PACS medical imaging system. Because of radiation treatments there, lead-lined walls restrict the wireless signal, so wireless coverage in that facility requires more access points, and the large image files require a lot of network bandwidth.

"Those pen tablets are continually in use. That system is really mission critical," says Mandelbaum. "We are planning to go to 54 Megahertz 802.11g out there to speed up the image throughput because we know there will be a lot more pen tablets in the near future. And we plan to double our density of access points out there to cover the demand."

"For security reasons, I separate the cancer center with a profile that has specific MAC addresses with unique WEP keys and SSID," says Mandelbaum "Mobile Manager helps with the rotation of the WEP keys. It helps us change SSIDs. And it helps us input the MAC addresses for MAC authentication. That saves hours of work."

Wireless Growing in Popularity

"Now we´re adding Access Points to cover conference rooms in the administrative offices," says Mandelbaum. "People are realizing that they can have access all over the hospital to work more efficiently. The conference rooms are only wired with two or three ports. If you have thirty people in a meeting, the wireless access points make it possible for a lot more people to use their PDAs or laptops."

"The big advantage of the Wavelink software is the ability to manage all the wireless equipment on the network from one location, and see what´s going on right away." says Mandelbaum. "With Mobile Manager, these systems are much more secure because we can use Cisco LEAP, WEP keys, SSID and MAC authentication. It gives us a much more robust and secure environment for the doctors, nurses, and technicians to do the work they need to do."

ABOUT WAVELINK

Wavelink Corporation is a leading provider of wireless communications software and the developer of a wireless platform that enables enterprises to develop, manage and deploy wireless applications. Since 1992, Wavelink´s innovative software has powered a growing number of Fortune 1,000 companies and is rapidly becoming a standard in wireless network development, deployment and management, with more than 40,000 installations in over 50 countries. Wavelink supports the world´s most popular programming languages and device operating systems, and has extended its expertise from wireless local area networks (WLAN) to the wireless wide area networks (WWAN) space. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call +1-425-823-0111.