Wifi Revolution

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust, the internationally-renowned heart and lung center, has deployed an Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) to form the core component of its IT strategy. Facilitating total mobility of its patient services, this deployment aims to transform clinical care.

 

Comprising of two hospitals 20 miles apart at Chelsea and Uxbridge, London, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust will utilize the wireless network to deliver sensitive data that requires resilience, security and speed – such as x-ray images, patient monitoring information, pathology results and cardiovascular imaging. It allows the staff to transmit the data into a central database, crucial in ensuring fast and accurate patient identification and diagnosis. The staff can do this as it will be equipped with Tablet PCs such as Mobile Clinical Assistants (MCAs), to record medical information direct from patients’ wristbands or at their bedsides.

 

The wireless network, which is based on Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniAccess WLAN technology, will complement and support the Trust’s existing Alcatel-Lucent fixed data infrastructure. While the network will facilitate more users following site acceptance tests, 300 clinicians and consultants will gain access to the wireless facilities in the initial rollout.

 

Providing Trust employees the ability to perform clinical procedures and access patient information anywhere in the hospital, Alcatel-Lucent’s wireless network was installed by networking and security integrator Khipu Networks. It can also support the organization’s aim of offering ‘paper-light’ electronic access to all clinical, managerial and administrative records by 2011.

 

To remove the cost of internal calls, Royal Brompton & Harefield has future plans to link the telecommunications at both sites using voice over IP (VoIP). Facilitating the staff to automatically switch over to the Wi-Fi network whenever they’re onsite, the organization plans to give the staff GSM devices with wireless capabilities. The Trust is also examining the deployment of ‘hands free’, location monitoring and communication technology.

 

“Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust is a dynamic organization in which excellence in clinical innovation is matched equally by technical innovation. It puts patient care at the heart of new communications projects, understands the importance of connected knowledge and ensures deployments are sufficiently robust to prevent care from being compromised by technical issues,” said Simon Price, account manager, Alcatel-Lucent enterprise activities for the UK and Ireland.

 

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