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With latest politics surrounding Healthcare reform, it is good to see there is interest in helping hospitals increase productivity and reduce errors by investing into Electronic Medical Records (EMR). A recent post on Yahoo News is that Vice President Joe Biden plans to announce a nearly $1.2 billion in grants to help hospitals transition to electronic medical records.
Anyone who has been to a hospital that still uses paper systems understands how inefficient and error prone these systems are. Nurses don’t have the information bedside, so they have to go to the desk down the hall where the records are kept, get information and write it down. During their trip, they could have interruptions and the information could get lost or recorded wrong. Not a good situation for the patient, nurse, doctor, or hospital.
EMR systems are great at addressing these very issues. By using Workstations on Wheels (WOWs) or Tablet PCs, Nurses can have everything they need bedside with the patient. It eliminates distractions, provides real-time information and updates, reduces errors, scans barcode bracelets, and improves productivity. These grants are not only good for the hospitals, but good for the vendors that deliver EMR software, tablet PCs and wireless LANs to healthcare organizations.
Though most of the focus will be on the EMR software, tablet PCs and WOWs, this would be an excellent time for healthcare organizations to revaluate their wireless LANs which EMR effectiveness will be dependent on for service. Since EMR devices are mobile (hand carry or on wheels), they use wireless LAN for connectivity. If the present wireless LAN cannot handle seamless client roaming with the addition of mixed traffic types (voice, video and data) and mixed client devices 802.11 b/g/n, nurses will find the system frustrating due to disconnects or dropped connections, requiring them to retype the information in again, causing delays and decreasing the expected gains in productivity that the administration expected.
As an example, recently Halifax Health deployed a Meru wireless for their new facility. Tripp Sills, Halifax Health’s Network Engineer was quoted “If nurses on mobile workstations lose their connection while entering EMR data, they’ll have to reenter it from the beginning, losing valuable time. The consequences could be even more serious if clinicians can’t use their mobile tablets to scan a patient’s wristband and medical chart to ensure that medication is administered properly.”
Hospitals are quickly adopting wireless LAN as their primary network access for voice communications using Vocera, Polycom, or Ascom, EMR with Meditech, and video, which means that the wireless network is not only business critical, but it has to behave like an Ethernet switched network, only mobile.
If uncle Joe wants to hand out $1.2B in grants for EMR, then healthcare organizations should use this opportunity to update their wireless LANs to the latest 802.11n standard which provides greater than 6X performance over 802.11g, ensuring they will have sufficient performance and capacity for next generation healthcare applications.
