Wavelink Secures Wireless LAN Deployment for Digital Hospital

Mobilizing Hospital Staff To Improve Patient Care At St. Vincent´s

CHALLENGE

Nationally recognized for its technology initiatives, St. Vincent´s Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, is more than 100 years old, yet it consistently ranks in the top percentiles for inpatient satisfaction in the nation´s largest patient satisfaction database.

Today the 338-bed acute care hospital continues to innovate in order to improve patient care by deploying a new campus-wide wireless-computing network for its doctors, nurses and hospital staff.

"The wireless LAN network is another enhancement to our system that enables physicians to access vital patient information and the knowledge they need at the point of care and beyond the walls of the hospital to make quicker, better informed decisions," says Curtis James, St. Vincent's president and CEO. "Physicians and nurses will finally be free to use their wireless devices securely to optimize their time, and make more timely assessments and decisions. The result will be better care for our patients and efficiencies for our physicians and staff - everyone wins"

St. Vincent´s IT team picked Wavelink Mobile Manager software to speed the deployment of the secure wireless LAN infrastructure across its five-building campus and to manage the associated network administration chores more efficiently and cost effectively from one location.

"It probably shaved two weeks off the deployment project," says Jackie Kennedy, Director, Health Information Services for St. Vincent´s. Kennedy justified the cost of the software in terms of administrative labor savings. "Once the 167 access points were physically installed, we could sit in one location and push configuration to all of them in minutes instead of days. The ability to remotely control all those access points, see and easily modify their configurations, is a huge time savings over having to Telnet to each device to change its settings."

And more importantly, Wavelink Mobile Manager provides some critical network security capabilities to address key considerations of the hospital´s IT staff. "One of our biggest concerns was security and our ability to detect rogue access points," continues Kennedy, who says an engineer from Cisco, the company that supplied the Aironet 350 access points, introduced him to Wavelink. "That´s why Cisco suggested Mobile Manager. They also knew we had a relatively small staff to administer our network and the additional 167 access points would be an issue for us."

SOLUTION

St. Vincent´s originally piloted the Wi-Fi (802.11b) network concept with an in-house application that allowed hospital staff to register incoming patients at remote clinics across the campus. They equipped a few rolling carts with wireless tablet computers, credit card scanners, and optical scanners for copying insurance cards and other patient documents. The benefits of "bedside registration" proved the value of a hospital-wide wireless infrastructure - the latest chapter in St. Vincent´s ongoing digital hospital initiative.

Since installing the campus-wide wireless LAN, the hospital has already expanded that bedside registration service with additional carts, but their plans for wireless computing extend far beyond hospital administrative tasks. St. Vincent's beginning to equip nurses with tablet computers and doctors with PDAs that provide secure access to patient charts and records updated in real-time. The plan is to allow doctors to review the latest patient information and soon to electronically place orders for care from anywhere, at any time without having to access a hardwired computer terminal.

"We have a program that would pulls the patient information and represent it in XML format so it can be easily displayed on a handheld PDA," explains Kennedy. "Now some of our doctors can access that information on their HP iPAQs. The doctor has access to the latest patient information wherever he is - either at the bedside or when he is paged from some other location in the hospital."

To help ensure the security of patient data, consultants for BellSouth helped St.Vincent´s plan and install what is touted to be the largest Cisco wireless LAN in the Southeast. BellSouth did a comprehensive site survey of the hospital to ascertain the most appropriate physical locations for the access points to ensure proper coverage and yet limit the footprint to the boundaries of the campus.

Now St. Vincent´s network administrators use Wavelink Mobile Manager to manage the wireless network. "We use Mobile Manager to look at the settings on access points to see if we need to make adjustments," says Kennedy. "We´ve also tested its ability to detect rogue access points and we´re confident it will work if someone tries to install something on the network that we don´t want."

In the meantime, the hospital is focused on user acceptance and rapid adoption of the new wireless technology. It is important that the doctors and nurses perceive their new tools to be faster and easier to use. In that regard, St. Vincent´s network administrators can use Mobile Manager to optimize bandwidth consumption on the network to ensure rapid response times.

"We expect that physicians will have greater accessibility to patient data so they will be more responsive," says Kennedy. "Nurses will have more flexibility in how and when they update patient information so that information can be recorded more accurately and reported in real-time. In sum, fewer errors, more accurate and complete information will improve patient care with better outcomes."

ABOUT ST.VINCENT'S HOSPITAL

St. Vincent´s, a 338-bed acute care hospital serving a five-county area, is a member of Ascension Health, the nation´s largest not-for-profit health system. St. Vincent´s is designated as Ascension Health´s flagship digital hospital and has been recognized nationally for its technology initiatives. St. Vincent´s is a past winner of the Alabama Quality Award for Healthcare; has been named a McKesson Clinical Leader; and has been named one of the country´s 100 Most Wired Hospitals. Service areas include: Women´s and Children´s Services, Oncology, Cardiology, Orthopedics, Neurology and Surgical Services. St. Vincent´s consistently ranks among the top 15 percent in inpatient satisfaction in the nation´s largest patient satisfaction database, Press Ganey, and has earned numerous awards for its community involvement and commitment to caring for the poor and vulnerable. Additional information about St. Vincent´s is available at www.stv.org.

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.