If you were laid up in the hospital, wouldn't you take comfort in knowing that the doctors and nurses were wirelessly connected to each other at all times? Hospitals have long used pagers and cellular phones to keep staffers connected, but have wrestled with many problems. At Mission Community Hospital in Panorama City, California, the solution is a wireless LAN, using Wi-Fi telephones.
The 150-bed hospital has installed SpectraLink NetLink Wi-Fi wireless telephones so the nursing staff can immediately contact hospital physicians throughout the facility. The hospital has a Cisco-based 802.11g wireless network across its entire campus, and the phones use the 802.11b standard to communicate wirelessly.
Mission Community's deployment of the phones is a divergence from how most hospitals structure their internal communications. It's very common at most hospitals for staffers to carry cell phones, and Mission Community followed that model previously—but ran into many problems with the interference the phones would cause when near patients' medical equipment. Physicians and nurses using their cell phones were unable to walk near patients' rooms because of the problems the phones caused with IV monitors. Hospital staffers would keep their cell phones turned off when in close proximity to any medical equipment, undermining the possibility of constant wireless connection.
"In hospitals this kind of interference has been a longstanding problem," says Ash Dave, systems transformation advisor at Mission Community. "The SpectraLink phones have been embraced by everyone on the staff, and the physicians agree that there is a better quality of patient care because of them."
Dr. Robert Thompson, the hospital's vice chief of staff and a pulmonary medicine physician, agrees. "They save time and result in improved service to our patients. With the new handsets, we expect much greater efficiencies in our process for the administration of both medications and necessary tests."
SpectraLink's Wi-Fi phones have a number of unusual capabilities. They use proprietary technology called SpectraLink Voice Priority (SVP) to ensure the quality of packetized voice conversations, thus addressing the problems with call quality that have arisen with other Wi-Fi phones.
The ruggedized NetLink i640 phones offer a push-to-talk feature that can be used to broadcast a message to multiple handsets across the hospital campus in emergencies. For example, a Code Blue alert, calling doctors and nurses to one central location in case of a cardiac arrest, can be issued by one person using the push-to-talk capability. The phones are also capable of sending and receiving text messages.
Mission Community's central data center houses the gateways that interface with the phones, and Wi-Fi access points are located throughout the campus. Using one of the SpectraLink phones, a staffer who is connected via Wi-Fi can place calls to or receive off-site calls from landline and cellular phones.
Aside from the immediate utility of the Wi-Fi phones in emergency situations, it's also part of the culture at most hospitals for staffers to go on and off duty regularly, without perfect ways to keep track of who is available. The phones keep doctors and nurses connected regardless of their on-call status.
SpectraLink's phones are available for all kinds of enterprises, not just hospitals, through a program called NetLink. The phones have full integration with legacy IP and PBX systems, plus support for H.323 and proprietary Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. For traditional PBX systems, NetLink Telephone Gateways provide packetized voice conversations over a wireless LAN without sacrificing digital telephone capabilities. Costs vary by the size of a deployment, but if a Wi-Fi network is already in place at the enterprise, there isn't much additional cost beyond buying the phones.
Though hospitals are more accustomed to emergencies than most kinds of enterprises are, many kinds of businesses with large corporate campuses can keep employees linked with Wi-Fi phones. And in case of emergency, just push-to-talk to reach everyone—instantly.