wifi news from FierceHealthIT

This week, Sprint has gone ahead, working with GE Healthcare to provide a platform for patient data sharing. This move is important not only for healthcare readers, but also for wireless users Read more...

Automated hospital asset tracking isn't a new idea. WiFi isn't a new idea. And of course, hospitals have always kept track of patients as they move through the system. But when you hit the HIMSS show floor, expect to see new solutions that integrate many of these elements into a large hospital ecosystem--one that starts at the ED door and extends across the hospital's assets, people, medication systems and more. These days, many solutions are being built around WiFi, linking asset tracking, patient tracking, pharmacy dispensing and more. I see the emergence, ultimately, of a "hospital operating system," one that goes well beyond IT integration efforts to an almost self-aware level.

It's difficult to characterize these technologies in a single sentence, as they range from systems that focus largely on RFID tagging to network analysis to others largely focused on keeping tabs on patients. For example, there's Emergin's nurse call and patient monitoring systems, which rest on a larger hospital IT integration platform. There are several vendors, such as Ekahau, Trapeze Networks, Versus and Aero Scout, that use WiFi to track not only traditional hard assets, but also equipment and/or people within the organization. But the bottom line, as always, is the patients, and simply tracking them is only part of the way. I'm going to ask vendors like these for some hard data as to how all of this might improve the patient care process, and I encourage you to do the same.

Driven by a desire to move seamlessly across the clinical environment, doctors are leapfrogging over WiFi-enabled laptops and PC-synched PDAs into the next generation of wireless connectivity. Rather than lugging around a laptop or last-gen PDA, physicians are buying Swiss Army Knife-style smartphones with cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. And they're not just surfing the Web and reading email. In some cases they're even retrieving medical images, using them when seconds count …

Read more...

As the theft of patient data from Allina Hospitals and Clinics reminds us (see below), today's healthcare IT departments are in something of a security bind. With HIPAA enforcement looming, maintaining tight data security is more critical than …

Read more...