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About
INNOVATOR 2005: University of Miami
7/28/2005
Key Players Clinicians/faculty, patients, hospital administrators, visiting professors, guests, and IT staff all stand to benefit from the WLAN. According to Chris Bogue, director of Information Technology, and Information Security officer, “Our primary technical lead was our network manager, Frank Rodriguez, with his technical support staff. We evaluated several technologies with a focus on providing information access anytime, anywhere at the medical center. The design centered on enabling secure access to electronic medical records, enabling future technologies such as wireless voice, video and data services, as well as upcoming RFID initiatives. We have a highly skilled network engineering staff experienced with wireless networking, telephony, and information security. Our primary concerns with deployment, management, and maintenance of a wireless LAN covering some three million square feet of indoor space were ironed out once we set up side-by-side pilots of similar WLAN technologies. We are currently working with IBM (www.ibm.com) to deploy a voice-activated communication system on the wireless network.”Results
Wireless networking is a natural fit for a highly dynamic and mobile clinical environment. However, implementing wireless technologies in hospitals poses myriad technical challenges unlikely to be found in other mission-critical enterprise wireless networking environments. Says Bogue, “Our primary concerns were adherence to stringent security requirements, addressing numerous autonomous administrative domains, mitigating reliability concerns, addressing uncertainty surrounding device types and applications, dealing with limited IT resources, and constantly changing density requirements for voice and data services. Overcoming these challenges is no small matter. To do this on the scale of the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center is tremendous testament to other institutions that the promise of mobile healthcare is indeed achievable.”
With the completion of Phase I, most of the U of M/Jackson Memorial Medical Center divisions—including the Bascom/Palmer Eye Institute; facilities in West Palm Beach, Naples, and Deerfield Beach; and several other clinics—have WLAN coverage and are tied together via private wireless bridges. To date, wireless APs have been deployed for student use in medical school lecture halls, as well as all of the hospital operating supporting mobile clinical information systems. There is also an ongoing expansion of deployment of mobile wireless carts in key hospital areas to support registration, medical records access, patient scheduling, and clinical information applications. “We believe our deployment here is different in that it is completely pervasive throughout the entire medical center and addresses all aspects of wireless networking here,” says Bogue. “Guest users, registered users, mobile carts, wireless PDAs, and voice services are all using the same infrastructure with varying levels of security. In the last four months, we’ve seen a 26 percent increase in the amount of wireless devices using this network, and it’s rising.There is a clear need to mobilize the workforce.”
Surprises
With the expansion of its WLAN deployment, the IT team began to encounter the usual issues with rogue access points set up by students or others who wanted to jump on the wireless bandwagon more quickly than specified in the IT department’s rollout plans.
