Healthcare

Assets, including hospital equipment and medication, can be tagged and a management system tracks their real-time location and status. Using Wi-Fi standards, these systems enable healthcare providers to use their existing access points and hardware. This eliminates the need to purchase a new network infrastructure and dramatically decreases deployment times.

Telemedicine, and the use of wired and wireless networks, makes it possible for healthcare providers to care for their patients in the patients' homes or in other remote areas. This enables caregivers to collect and transfer medical data, still images, and live audio and video transmissions. The result is quality care provided at a lower cost.

Collaboration enables an integrated, real-time method for doctors, clinicians, and other healthcare providers, along with patients and their families, to communicate via a system of voice, video, data, and mobility solutions. This also provides an intelligent platform for care givers to share medical images and patient files using any device, wired or wireless.

In healthcare delivery, time to diagnosis can be the difference between life and death. Unified communications solutions enable emergency healthcare personnel to share patient health history, vital signs and diagnostic tests and images with healthcare personnel as the patient is in transit. These records are stored and accessed from a central database so all electronic patient records are accessible quickly and easily.

These solutions enable physicians and nurses to reach each other over multiple types of handheld devices, wherever they have a wireless signal. This provides more efficient patient care from almost any location. These solutions deliver nurse call alerts to handheld devices and display the status of the patient's condition.

New business imperatives are requiring healthcare organizations to take a new approach to the design and management of the data center. The goal is to move from rigid, dispersed platforms to more flexible, integrated, and virtualized environments. By unifying the underlying resources, processes, applications, and personnel supporting the organization, the data center network will become the foundation for implementing new capabilities to increase efficiency and meet patient needs. The next-generation data center platform will unite compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership and increase business agility.

The data center in a healthcare organization is expected to house an ever-increasing amount of patient information electronically, while providing physicians, nurses, and emergency personnel unrestricted access to critical data. For healthcare administrators and IT professionals, high availability, data replication, and disaster recovery are essential elements for ensuring the new era in electronic records flows smoothly and effectively.

Traditional healthcare delivery models have begun to shift to alternative models of care outside of physicians' offices and hospitals. Managing the data and images from the primary facility and from the growing number of worksite and retail health clinics is driving investment in multi-tiered storage facilities, and in disaster recovery and replication systems. Storage virtualization is a significant opportunity in the healthcare market as it provides the data center with the opportunity to increase the overall efficiency of its storage systems. By virtualizing storage, the physical location of data becomes abstracted from the hosts, and the data is instantly commoditized. Tiers of storage can be created, and the data can be moved between tiers automatically, while applications continue running operations, resulting in zero down-time.

By controlling access to patient records, healthcare providers meet HIPAA compliance mandates, and ensure that patients medical records remain private. If an unauthorized hospital employee gains access to personal medical records, damage to the hospital's reputation can be significant. In addition, regulatory fines and penalties are likely to be levied.

Security is important when dealing with all types of medical issues. Medical professionals are concerned when using any form of technology that allows patient details to flow outside of their direct control to third parties. Securing patient files as they move from the internal network to remote sites via IP (Web) transport is critical.

Hospitals and other care environments are complex institutions with complex patient record workflows. Many healthcare professionals need access to medical records to treat a patient quickly and accurately. Those needing access include: emergency technicians, admitting staff, doctors, nurses, and back-office personnel in billing and accounting. Security of these records is paramount as the records transverse the networks though out the healthcare provider network.

Healthcare organizations can take advantage of asset-tracking solutions to help caregivers quickly find wheelchairs, infusion pumps, or other equipment. Asset tracking can also be combined with condition tracking, which is the collection of contextual information about the asset, such as the storage climate of medications. If the temperature at which medication is stored moves out of the acceptable range, caregivers can be alerted to take immediate action.

Telemedicine makes it possible for healthcare providers to care for their patients remotely. This enables caregivers to collect and transfer medical data, still images, and live audio and video transmissions via wireless protocols, thereby providing quality care at a lower cost.

Systems available today enable physicians to use IP phones throughout any facility to contact nurses over a wireless nurse call system. In addition, physicians and nurses can use roving clinical workstations, which are mobile carts with wireless-enabled PC's. Clinicians can access patient records, update medical charts, verify prescriptions, and transmit physician orders right at the bedside or point of care, thereby enhancing patient quality of care and patient experience throughout their stay.