Project Management and Process

Lifespan chose to handle all project management and implementation in-house. The deployment included all facilities managed through a central office. The technical portion of the deployment was also centrally managed through its NOC for provisioning. All needs for information such as floor plans and labor, AP placement, and Power over Ethernet were handled separately through the facilities organization.

Deployment and Implementation

At Lifespan, the enterprise WLAN deployment involved everyone. A comprehensive team included individuals from networking, applications, helpdesk, and the physicians and clinicians who use it. Adoption was driven by getting buy-in from everyone at Lifespan.

Training on applications and devices used on the WLAN was relatively easy. Access to all clinical data was provided through a web portal called Lifelinks. This application (portal) is the same on all systems, wired or wireless. The WLAN-enabled device took little time to learn because it was familiar to the users. In the end, the one aspect of training that requires ongoing education is ensuring that people keep point-of-care devices charged.

Site Survey

The site surveys were handled through a combination of internal staff supplemented by third-party contractors for frequency analysis.

Having a complex family of devices that operate in multiple frequency bands is a constant concern regarding interference. This concern mandates the use of a complex and thorough site surveyin operating rooms, a complete frequency analysis was done while they were in full operation to map frequency interference under real-time conditions. This helped to create a complete picture of what interference (RF patterns) existed. In the end, when conducting a proper site survey is important to avoid having to set up separate rules or having "one-off" exemptions and to be able to function efficiently.

Additional WLAN changes underway at Lifespan now revolve around the need for higher densities. These changes when combined with the internal site survey and AP placement selection will enhance Lifespan's WLAN to support higher-level applications. The idea is to continue with Lifespan's innovative approach. Hemendinger's philosophy is "Just keep moving along and grow the WLAN as required to support the advanced clinical systems required by our clinicians and expected by our patients."