Wifi Revolution

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power integrated circuits and wireless communications have revolutionized healthcare by allowing inexpensive, non-invasive, continuous, ambulatory health systems to flourish.

Meru Networks Inc., a provider of virtualized and optimized 802.11n enterprise networking, has announced that Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare has replaced its legacy microcell wireless LAN with Meru Networks’ (News - Alert) virtualized WLAN solutions to manage the complexity of operating a rich suite of converged applications to improve patient care and reduce operating costs.

Located in Utica, N.Y., Faxton is a not-for-profit healthcare system with two campus locations for inpatient and outpatient care, as well as long term care.

Faxton powered a suite of key applications from McKesson, Eclipsys, Rauland, TeleTracking Technologies and Ascom (News - Alert) simultaneously and interactively across their 1.3 million square foot facility to optimize performance of business-critical applications like bedside registration, RFID for hospital asset tracking, transport service response teletracking, surgery scheduling, nurse voice call and automated temperature medication monitoring.

Don Parlagreco, team lead and network analyst for Faxton says that their team is dedicated to finding ways to use technology to improve staff operations and create an efficient workflow to treat patients faster, all the while decreasing costs.

Faxton replaced its Cisco (News - Alert) WLAN products with Meru Networks because they were finding that roaming hiccups were putting limits around what they could potentially achieve with their healthcare information systems.

Parlagreco says that after deploying Meru, the company did not have to worry about re-converging the network every time somebody brings in a new access point. Meru’s WLAN solutions helped them to stay focused on enriching its healthcare operations and decreasing its overall costs.

With Meru, Faxton has seen great improvements in patient care as well as in the performance of critical, high bandwidth-intensive data devices. By leveraging Meru’s Virtual Cell technology, Faxton now has a predictable network that powers seamless roaming throughout and across its hospitals. Staff and patients alike are able to use their wireless devices over a reliable and predictable network.