Halifax Health's new 500,000-square-foot, high-tech medical facility in Daytona Beach, Fla., is poised to open this week equipped with a wireless network aimed at boosting mobility and productivity for clinicians and staff.
The network from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Meru Networks is based on the latest 802.11n wireless standard. It spans all 10 floors of the new North Tower, including 180 private rooms and an 89,000-square-foot emergency department containing the area's only trauma center.
The network will provide connectivity for mobile workstations that support applications such as electronic medical records, bedside bar-code scanning for drug-dosage verification, and remote video interpreting for hard-of-hearing patients.
Virtual cell approach
Meru's virtual-cell WLAN platform outperformed other vendors' micro-cell architectures in a live test Halifax Health set up to evaluate performance, voice-data roaming capabilities, ease of operation, and equipment and maintenance costs for wireless in the North Tower, according to Tripp Sills, network architect at Halifax Health.
"Many of our key mobile applications - Meditech EMR, Motion C5 tablets for clinical data entry, Siemens VoIP phones, LifeLinks remote video interpreting - are highly delay-sensitive yet need 100 percent availability," Sills said. "If nurses on mobile workstations lose their connection while entering EMR data, they'll have to re-enter 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. 802.11n gives us the high bandwidth these applications need, but the assurance of seamless roaming is equally important, especially as we continue to roll out our VoIP solutions."
Halifax Health had previously deployed conventional "micro cell" WLANs in the other buildings on its campus, but had experienced problems with channel interference and disconnections while roaming. As a result, the organization decided to take another look at WLAN vendors in preparation for opening the North Tower, with its advanced treatment facilities and multimedia applications
"After our testing, we realized that the virtual cell approach, which allows all Meru access points to be on the same channel and share a common BSSID - and for the controller to dictate which access points a given client connects to - leads to huge benefits in terms of roaming and elimination of interference," Sills said.
The WLAN deployment in Halifax Health's North Tower includes approximately 175 Meru AP311 dual-radio access points; each AP has one 802.11n radio and one 802.11a/b/g radio (software-upgradeable to 11n). Two MC4100 controllers provide centralized intelligent RF management for all access points on the network.
Future plans call for the Meru WLAN to support the use of Vocera wearable voice communication badges using Wi-Fi, as well as dual-mode telephones supporting both cellular and Wi-Fi communication.
