A distributed antenna system keeps HealthAlliance’s wireless signals strong anywhere in the hospital, improving patient care and staff productivity
Background
Formed more than a century ago, HealthAlliance Hospital has a rich and lengthy tradition of providing patient and community health care in north central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Until recently, the hospital was divided into two campuses: the Burbank Hospital, formed in 1890, and the Leominster Hospital, formed in 1902. In 1994, the two campuses merged to form the partnership now known as the Central New England HealthAlliance.
In 1998, HealthAlliance further strengthened its place as a community resource by becoming a member of the UMass Memorial Health Care system. This partnership has provided HealthAlliance patients with direct access to the services of UMass’s nationally recognized academic medical center.
With a nurse and physician staff of more than 600 and the capacity to treat nearly 60,000 emergency room patients each year, HealthAlliance has more than a decade of experience using wireless and mobile technologies to address the challenges of providing patient care on a large scale.
Challenges
By the mid-2000s, mobile health care technologies were already familiar to HealthAlliance Hospital employees. Cellular and wireless capabilities had enabled mobile solutions such as wireless carts used by nurses to provide accurate bedside care for patients, handheld devices for looking up drug information, telemetry systems and automated supplies ordering. HealthAlliance guests also had access to the hospital’s wireless network, which allowed them to make cell phone calls or access the Internet in many areas of the building.
However, the wireless infrastructure was fast becoming outdated and was not without its problems. For starters, the various types of wireless functions required the services of multiple carriers, which complicated HealthAlliance’s efforts to manage things on the IT side. Multiple wireless carriers also meant an increased risk of signal interference with biomedical equipment.
In addition, HealthAlliance’s wireless capabilities weren’t available in all parts of the hospital, and there were many “dead” spots in places like elevators, stairwells and basement-level rooms. This spotty coverage increased the chance of communications failures at critical times.
Finally, because of rapid-fire advances in mobile health care technology (such as VoIP), HealthAlliance’s IT management team, led by CIO Richard Mohnk, was faced with the challenge of keeping up with an increasing array of wireless networking options. The prospect of adding new mobile health technologies was beginning to look like a logistical tangle involving ever more wireless service providers and costly installations.
HealthAlliance needed a solution that would allow it to keep up with emerging technologies and provide uninterrupted wireless coverage in all areas. But simply adding wireless vendors to handle added capacity and applications would simply compound the existing problem. For example, incorporating fire, police and ambulance communications onto one system would mean enabling devices like two-way radios, pagers and PDAs. Each of these might call for its own antenna, requiring multiple installations, especially in the ceilings. Ceiling-based installations were expensive, time-consuming and disruptive, kicking up dust and debris that could increase infection risk among patients.
Clearly, HealthAlliance needed an integrated solution that would require a single wireless system to handle all of the hospital’s present and future mobile health care needs.
The solution
To address these logistical challenges, Mohnk and HealthAlliance Vice President of Facilities Dave Duncan set out to find an integrated wireless infrastructure. After many product demonstrations, meetings with vendors and visits to other wirelessly enabled hospital systems, they decided on InnerWireless’ Medical-grade Wireless Utility, a single-antenna-based system.
The InnerWireless Medical-grade Wireless Utility presented a twofold solution: comprehensive coverage with no dead spots, and a single distributed antenna system that carried multiple signal strengths and signal types. Since InnerWireless was able to guarantee 100 percent coverage without costly multiple-antenna installations, HealthAlliance's board was convinced of the plan's cost-effectiveness and eventual return on investment. HealthAlliance's Leominster campus went live with the system in November 2005.
The benefits of this system presented themselves right away: the distributed antenna system could be a closet-based installation, instead of ceiling-based, which meant workers would not have to disrupt patient care and safety by tearing apart ceiling tiles.
Outcomes
Aside from the staff’s learning curve with new mobile devices, as well as occasional downtime for upgrades, the distributed antenna system has been overwhelmingly beneficial for HealthAlliance's everyday operations, making differences big and small.
Benefits for IT
- According to Mohnk, HealthAlliance’s small IT staff found the system easier to manage and upgrade than the decentralized patchwork of wireless networking options previously in place. In fact, the entire wireless network can now be managed with fewer than two full-time IT employees.
- Upgrades now typically take only 10 minutes, with downtime to the affected system only. In other words, during a data upgrade, there is no interruption to cell service, pagers or communications with police and paramedics.
- InnerWireless’ powerful single-antenna system provides seemingly endless headroom for HealthAlliance’s future capacity upgrades (such as a new phone system).
Benefits for hospital administrators
- According to Mohnk, the new system’s efficiencies helped the hospital recoup its investment within two years, much more quickly than expected.
- The increased productivity from staff has led to more streamlined workflows and improved patient care. Some examples:
- Uninterrupted wireless connectivity for nurses who use PDAs to access patient information means that nurses no longer have to leave a patient’s room to look up medical records and other critical information.
- Test results, such as from an X-ray, are available to doctors almost immediately during appointments, and they can share this information right away with patients. And with digital films, doctors can access X-ray results at home or in an office without having to pick up the films at another location.
Benefits for staff and guests
- If a nurse gets a page that a patient has gone into cardiac arrest, he or she can see the EKG irregularity on a PDA on the way to the patient’s room.
- Nurses can now regulate IV pumps electronically instead of manually. Considering the hundreds of such pumps in operation at HealthAlliance, the productivity benefits are enormous, according to Mohnk.
- Before the InnerWireless upgrade, nurses trying to scan patients’ barcoded wristbands had to maneuver cart-tethered wristband readers around other equipment in the room. Or they may have had to contend with a patient in isolation, for whom the cart may have presented a contamination risk. Nurses can now scan patients’ barcoded wristbands more easily with portable wireless readers, which can be wiped clean between each use.
- The hospital’s stronger, more reliable cell phone signal makes it easier for guests and staff to make critical calls in any part of the building, with no fear of signal competition with biomedical equipment.
- Many staff members have reported that they now spend less time hunting down information from different sources (paper files, laptops on hallway carts, physician orders) and more time treating patients, because the information is all available electronically in one place.
- Guests coming in for time-consuming outpatient treatments (such as dialysis or Chemotherapy) can bring in laptops to get work done or keep in touch with people via e-mail or instant messaging.
Encrypted system keeps patient information safe and secure
InnerWireless’ system uses standard WAPA and WEP encryption to make sure that patient information stays protected and confidential. Guests who access the wireless connection in their rooms are placed on a separate network, ensuring their information's security, as well as that of all patients in the hospital system. Thus, all confidential information is soundly protected both from outside the hospital and within its walls.
View the new HealthAlliance Video Series:
Watch how HealthAlliance, a Most Wireless Award winner, uses a single-antennae system as the backbone of its secure wireless network that connects multiple mobile devices in its facility.
See how mobile point-of-care technology is helping nurses at HealthAlliance improve workflow, increase safety and spend more time with patients.
Watch how HealthAlliance’s single-antennae wireless systems hosts everything from police and fire communications to patient data and lab processing and has reduced maintenance and installation time by more than 70 percent.
See how doctors and nurses at HealthAlliance transitioned to an always-on IT solution.
Watch how physicians at HealthAlliance are accessing patient data, reviewing medical records and prescribing medication all with the use of an efficient wireless technology system.
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