Doctors, Nurses Are Mobile at Waterbury Hospital with Cisco Wireless Solution from ChimeNet

September 28, 2006

Waterbury Hospital is a not-for-profit, acute care teaching hospital affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine, the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, and the Connecticut Children's Medical Center. The 300-bed facility recently overhauled its wireless network, expanding it from two to all nine floors, and for sub-second delivery of patient information via secure and mobile "computer on wheels" carts.

For this critical wireless deployment, Jim Olson, CIO of Waterbury Hospital, turned to ChimeNet, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner and technology affiliate for the Connecticut Hospital Association.

"Our tremendous engineering skill set earns us large deals that might ordinarily go to a bigger partner," says Dave LaSalata, business development manager for ChimeNet. "ChimeNet is small and lean and we fight hard for our clients. Our customer base is anyone who needs managed, secure services, and we have found great success in healthcare, education and professional services such as legal and accounting."

Olson spoke with several vendors about the hospital's increased wireless needs, and also contacted a major research and consulting firm for its recommendations. After researching solutions from different vendors, Olson was committed to Cisco and chose ChimeNet because of its engineering and experience in healthcare deployments.

"It was important to us that our network integrator have direct, successful hospital experience," says Olson. "We had heard some horror stories with wireless implementations that ended up with areas of unavailable access. We spoke with ChimeNet's healthcare customers and were convinced they are the best around."

Olson had four specific goals for the hospital's new wireless solution. First, he wanted to deliver sub-second response time to the nurses, physicians and other healthcare professionals working in the hospital, and this would require substantial bandwidth. Second, redundancy was essential because the applications being used are absolutely critical to the healthcare being provided. Third, a high degree of security was necessary to meet the federal government's HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act) regulations that provide standards to protect the privacy of personal health information. And last, because the hospital had some existing equipment for patient monitoring, the solution required flexibility.

"The pre-existing technology had to stay because of what it provided for the patients," says LaSalata. "The interoperability of the Cisco wireless platform allowed us to integrate the pre-existing technology, and that was essential to the solution."

LaSalata credits the success of the project to his close working relationship with Olson and all of Waterbury Hospital.

"The hospital is one of our best clients - there's a big trust factor there," he says. "We conducted pre-project meetings with our engineers to fully understand the hospital's needs, expectations and goals with the new wireless network."

ChimeNet then conducted an extensive site survey with a number of different wireless cards to extensively cover all nine floors of the facility. Each floor would present a unique challenge: some radiology floors had lead-lined walls, or the teams would find pre-existing wireless that they didn't know about. The site survey ended with the installation of 83 Cisco Aironet 1130 Series Access Points, with 68 access points in redundant configuration wired to separate IDF closets to create another level of redundancy.

"Determining the coverage was a really important strategy," says LaSalata. "The computer carts must access every part of the facility and maintain connectivity. And we needed to provide complete redundancy. If a nurse is inputting critical data, nothing can be dropped. So if an access point goes down, there has to be something to pick it up to ensure that no sessions or packets are lost." LaSalata and his team designed the network carefully on paper before installation, and the successful result was a real collaboration between his staff and the hospital's staff.

Existing security was integrated into the hospital's new wireless network, and needed to allow for a single sign-on so nurses could access the hospital's network from their rolling carts just as if they were sitting at a nursing station. VLANS offer access points in the lobby for visitors to safely log on.

"We opted to use the Cisco encryption standard at the hospital, which is more secure than the standard wireless encryption standard, and can be administered centrally," says Olson. And when a power over Ethernet blade went out recently, the redundancy design took over flawlessly.

"The nurses using their computers-on-wheels at the moment of the outage were transferred absolutely transparently and never knew there was an issue at all," says Olson.

With the new wireless network deployed at Waterbury Hospital, nurses have filled the baskets and drawers on their computer-on-wheels cart with supplies so they are not tied to a nursing station. This mobility means that nurses and physicians are spending more face-time with patients rather than continually returning to a centralized nursing station to obtain supplies, find charts or fill out reports. Olson says that more time spent with the patient means the hospital is providing a better quality of patient care.

"Waterbury Hospital is our showcase wireless implementation," says LaSalata, who sees the growing interest in wireless every day, particularly in healthcare.

"Radiology imaging, electronic medical records, and the HIPAA regulations have hospitals looking closely at their infrastructure and how they deliver information," he says. "Patient services and applications are being demanded across the spectrum of healthcare, and technology is driving it."