Verticals
Healthcare
The healthcare landscape continues to evolve, with the aim of delivering better patient care and doing so with fewer resources. Using new technologies and employing them in new ways are paying handsome dividends for many of our healthcare customers. The efficiencies afforded from networking capabilities that truncate the decision cycle, drive effective collaboration instantly and ensure the right information reaches the right party at the right time enable Hospitals to focus on their core business, without distraction.
It's a dilemma faced by every hospital; how to match patient admissions and discharges to available beds in as timely a manner as possible. The process often requires hours of staff time, coordination of multiple departments and rarely seems to run smoothly. And every step of the process costs hospitals money and time and generally leaves patients wondering why everything is taking so long.
Sophisticated IT solutions offer just as much to hospital staff as operating rooms and surgical instruments. They allow healthcare teams to make quick, accurate diagnoses by giving all appropriate staff access to the same data in a real-time, secure environment. This more efficient approach helps the healthcare staff and the patient by reducing the amount of time most patients actually spend in the hospital, which means more patients can be treated. Automated discharge processes and instant notification capabilities ensure beds do not sit idle.
Think about it in this context: What would it cost to add a wing to your facility that would accommodate a 30 percent increase in capacity?
That’s the equivalent of adding a new wing without the need for fund-drive charity events to raise money for more beds and facilities. Some large hospitals are seeing a 25-30 percent increase in turnover, which equates to nearly a one-third increase in hospital capacity.
What if that same investment not only truncated discharge transactions, opened beds, reduced errors and sped up administrative tasks to free more time for patient care? Would that be attractive to the staff? It certainly improves the patient experience.
Enhancing business operations presents a great opportunity to meet current and even anticipate the regulatory environment that continues to grow more rigorous.
Network security is the most obvious element. IT security must strike a balance between opening doors for those with need and locking it shut to those who don’t. Some claim a simple solution is viable. It’s not simple. It can, however, be elegant. Layering security at every network layer and node is critical, but the orchestration between that and the ability to share large amounts of information in real-time is an art.
Virtualization of the infrastructure provides both. It keeps normal users in the walled-garden specific to their requirements. It makes raw data unobtainable from interlopers and with the back-up capabilities of powerful encryption, making information simply unavailable to prying eyes.
Security is but one, albeit a critical consideration.
Document management solutions designed for use in the medical field not only ensure that the right information is delivered to the right party at the right time, but also serve compliance requirements. While the network must be able to accommodate very high-bandwidth operations, it must also have the intelligence to identify specific priority traffic and allocate bandwidth as required to support access and transmission of huge files. The Electronic Health Records of an emergency room patient needs to bypass an X-Ray for an examination, for example.
New EHR requirements necessitate the delivery of meaningful medical information that is transferable to any healthcare provider in the United States. People with long medical histories need to be treated, and it cannot be accomplished without those records. Delivery must be measured in minutes, and that requires quality of service, prioritization and high-capacity networks.
In addition, the increasing reliance on medical imaging has created demands on the infrastructure that were unknown a few years ago. The Picture Archive Communications System (PACS) enables the computerized management and distribution of diagnostic images and allows clinicians to access, transfer and store these images, which can enhance consultations with patients, improve diagnoses, speed treatment times, and provide better overall patient care.
All seem simple enough, but storing data is a great deal easier than retrieving data, especially when that data is very bandwidth-intensive, as is medical data.
Sometimes we hear of very expensive proprietary solutions being pitched to hospitals to meet this need. It’s possible that some healthcare facilities would benefit from such an approach. We’ve taken a different path and have solved this problem for a number of our customers. Using a combination of our LevWare solution – which acts as a glue to bind disparate applications to create new functionality – and affordable, commercially-available solutions like SharePoint, we’ve gone head-to-head with competitors. While we always win on price, we’ve never lost from a technology perspective.
Wireless is another critical technology. It allows nurses to communicate in real-time, regardless of location, at the push of a button with the Vocera solution. Applications can be accessed on-the-fly. Situations can trigger specific events through the network.
Radio Frequency Identification is critical to smooth operations. Whether it’s ensuring the pharmaceuticals remain under lock and key or preventing the disruption of a nurse looking for a wheelchair that was borrowed by another ward or even keeping tabs on incapacitated patients, such as those with Alzheimer’s disease, the reliance on RFID will only continue to increase, especially as new applications of the technology are applied.
Wireless cannot be taken for granted in a critical-care environment. Too many demands on the network with profound consequences for the wrong course of action dictate the care of the network and all of its components.
However, in some cases, wireless has proven to be a victim of its own success. Early adopters are finding their capacity is no longer adequate and may require upgrades to the most recent standards. Some are operating on systems deployed years ago that have not been audited to ensure the hot-spots are still optimal.
