What the Future Holds

Hemendinger reiterated that the reason Lifespan is so successful is that its approach has always been pragmatic and futuristic: "Healthcare IT people typically aren't engineering solutions for the healthcare environment; most are focused on specific projects and tasks. Lifespan looked at it from an enterprise, re-engineering approach, and we were successful; we placed technology and systems holistically in concert with each other, not one at a time."

In clinical units, mounds of paper order slips located on a secretary's desk are gone. In the halls, clinicians wheel laptop carts and carry tablets, always in tune with up-to-the-minute patient data and clinical decision support systems. In conference rooms, administrative personnel wirelessly connect to network presentations, e-mail, and Internet access. On the nursing unit where the first personal VoIP device implementation was recently completed, the silence is deafening, with overhead paging virtually gone. This has a very positive effect on patients' ability to sleep, and it removes the constant reminder to patients that they are in a hospital.

Tracking and Telemetry

Hemendinger sees Lifespan's next step for breakthrough technologies emerging in the tracking and telemetry fields. He says that asset and resource tracking is a huge initiative in the healthcare arenait's the basic building block for process study and optimization. The idea is to have the WLAN infrastructure provide a method for gathering and transporting positional telemetry within the enterprise, which could include high-value assets, people, and processes.

In the healthcare environment, being able to track the location of a critical piece of equipment and direct it to the necessary location can have life-saving consequences. Being able to track and find medical devices for use and maintenance has financial benefits to all. Providers can quickly locate a piece of equipment without spending critical time searching for where it is supposed to be. This also allows the strategic placement of machines as opposed to having large numbers of them placed throughout the hospital. Typically these machines are very expensivereducing their numbers and optimizing their use reduces cost.

Hospital telemetry devices (such as EKG and fetal heart monitors) are historically large machines that impede the movement of patients. Improving the quality of care and enhancing the healing process includes making the time spent in the hospital more comfortable. Allowing patients to move about and be active is important to healthcare providers. Referring to how patients were traditionally confined to a room or bed because of the medical monitoring device to which they were "tied," Hemendinger sees the value in being able to provide the patient with the ability to move freely while receiving medical treatment: "We want to untie the monitored patient from their room as they are today due to immobile monitoring systems."

To fully utilize the enterprise WLAN to facilitate patient monitoring and telemetry, companies are shifting from conventional wired bedside devices to more portable, wireless-enabled ones. Medical information collection systems are becoming smaller, which helps to enable remote monitoring.

Hemendinger is also focused on the possibilities and future use of wireless, handheld point-of-care devices. Because these devices are portable, nurses and physicians can carry them around as they perform rounds to collect patient information. These wireless data collection and test devices will have continuous online connectivity with the clinical system for data transfer and retrieval. "The very sick patient who goes into Intensive Care requires lots of monitoring, and the physician or clinician will want to be able to monitor independent of location while having information fed back into the clinical systems," reports Hemendinger.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

RFID technology is currently in pilot testing at Lifespan. Mostly for discovery purposes, the company is looking into active and passive systems, both of which use the WLAN as a transport. Passive tags are used as an upload point from patient wristbands, which provide higher levels of patient identification, act as a backup device to bar-coding, and contain information in the form of a payload for use by the clinical systems. Active systems are less mature and are challenged with computational power.