Hardwired communications and computing devices are no longer the preferred tools of the trade for doctors and nurses at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC) in Winston-Salem, N.C. That is because the academic health system has gone wireless.
The 1,300-bed facility-comprising North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Brenner Children’s Hospital-concluded that a campus-wide wireless network would give medical staff faster and easier access to patient records via its electronic medical records (EMR) system.
“We realized that our caregivers are highly mobile and need devices that match their behavior,” explains Chuck Ware, director of computer and communication services at the medical center. “They were losing continuity of patient care when they traveled between locations using cabled PCs and phones.”
For example, doctors and nurses consult and update patient charts continually as they roam among inpatient, outpatient, office and research lab facilities scattered throughout 16 buildings. Having electronic access to patient information frees them from having to constantly return to a nurse’s station or hunt down a given patient’s paper chart and manually update it.
The medical center installed a 900-access-point (AP) wireless LAN to mobilize the electronic patient charting and to gain valuable timesavings with a direct, wireless patient-to-nurse call system and wireless connections for ultrasound equipment. The WLAN spans about two million square feet, stretching across inpatient, outpatient, post-anesthesia care and other critical areas, as well as the medical school lecture halls. A Meru Networks WLAN replaced the previous wireless system, and has become the first WLAN to cover all the other areas.
The initial 400 APs took about a month to install, says Mike Jarvis, lead network systems analyst. The job was completed quickly because the cabling was already in place to connect APs to the medical center’s wired Cisco Catalyst switches, which power the radios using standard…