A TV hospital drama recently showed why health care is the hot new market for voice over Wi-Fi applications. In a crucial plot twist, a post-operative patient almost died because a doctor had forgotten to recharge the batteries on his pager. Since paging isn’t real-time communication, no one knew the physician hadn’t received the message to rush to the patient’s room. Though a nervous resident saved the day by reopening the patient’s chest and massaging his heart, she never would have had to if the administrators had splurged on a Wi-Fi phone setup.
Unlike TV hospitals, real ones prefer a minimum of drama. But as even a TV show can illustrate, the very nature of the work increases the chances of dramatic – and costly – failures of communication. “The job of physicians and nursing staff is to move from room to room,” says Jeff Snyder, a Gartner analyst. “You never know where they are when you need to reach them. So there’s a real business case for being able to instantly contact such highly mobile workers, especially when life-and-death situations can occur.”
Wi-Fi phone systems from companies like Avaya and Colubris can help in several ways. They can serve as in-house cellular phones or cordless extensions. They can receive text messages. They can function like walkie-talkies. With the addition of devices and servers from a vendor like Vocera, they can let individuals talk to one another through lightweight “voice badges,” using voice recognition to “dial” other users by simply speaking their names.
Such capabilities can vastly improve intra-hospital communications. For example, Frank Lovasco, Avaya’s mobility solutions practice leader, notes that when a patient hits a call button, it’s a lot more efficient if a text message specifying the room number goes directly to a nurse’s handset. Otherwise, someone at a desk has to contact the nurse via a pager or the public address system, and the nurse has to call back to find out the room number. Similarly, it’s better to make “code blue” announcements directing staff to the emergency room over handsets than through overhead speakers. “Everybody knows what ‘code blue’ means,” says Lovasco.
WI-FI POCKETS
Installing Wi-Fi phone systems doesn’t usually require starting from scratch. “A lot of hospitals have pockets of Wi-Fi in portions of their facilities, but they may not be pervasive,” says Roger Sands, vice president of enterprise development for Wi-Fi vendor Colubris. “Now they are expanding their Wi-Fi infrastructure so it covers their entire campus.”
But that can be a significant undertaking. “Building out your network for voice over wireless LAN is very different from building it out for regular data applications,” says Gartner’s Snyder. “You have to create a much more dense set of access points, and put access points in stairwells and elevators.” In practical terms, voice over Wi-Fi may require from one-and-a-half to two times as many access points as data-only systems.
Although the earliest deployments of voice over Wi-Fi came in the retail and manufacturing sectors, the health care industry is rapidly catching up.
