Creating a Digital Medical Facility

Many businesses have benefited from the introduction of information Technology to their organization primarily because of the financial proceeds. The Southern Regional Health Authority located Mandeville, Jamaica, and the Mandeville Regional Hospital was not so concerned about the financial gains but more with the quality of patient care and increase in productivity. Copia Wireless shared their vision and promptly prepared a technical diagnosis. With Copia’s detailed networking solutions and infrastructure, the Mandeville Regional Hospital was transformed into the first state of the art, wirelessly connected medical facility in the Caribbean and perhaps the Western Hemisphere.

The Challenge
The southern Regional Health Authority’s primary goal is to improve the quality of patient care. This goal requires the capability to provide accurate, efficient and immediate diagnosis. This meant that the technical infrastructure had to be put in place help the goal to be materialized so a pilot project was conceived for the Mandeville Regional Hospital and the Manchester Health Department.
New Micronet networking device technology helps to meet one part of the goals equation: to share and access more detailed information with faster devices. Now the institution had to complete the other side of the equation: the ability to build and disperse a data base for patient information throughout the institution. Linking the entire system allows specialists, technologists, administrators and referring physicians in remote locations, such as out patient clinics to have universal access to patient files, patient history and the internet.

The Process
The hospital needed a network wherein doctors and medical staff were able to access data from the bedside of the patient however, could not afford to place a computer inside every room or ward of the hospital. Doctors also needed to evaluate symptoms from patient files in order to make smart diagnoses and quick prognoses. As a part of the process, the project included the Manchester Health Department and the Mandeville regional Hospital which are located on two separate compounds at approximately 1 Kilometer in proximity.

The Solution
With the building spread so widely apart from each other it would cost a fortune to run cables to facilitate the service. Therefore, a wireless networking solution using the Micronet’s SP912 Access Points and 14DBi antennae were used to create point-point links between different areas of the inside of hospital. Then, this was used to create a wireless cloud within that particular department or ward in order to link the accessing devices of the doctors. Outdoors, access points were mounted on buildings and a hybrid system, similar that inside, was strategically used to create the links between the buildings.

The Benefit
In effect, the doctors and nurses are able to reach a patient’s data while he or his is on/off a ward in the hospital using their PDAs, laptops, and desktops at nurses’ station. This network has made the general administration of medical care much easier than the former procedure which was otherwise analog; a process that was indeed extremely tedious and time consuming.
This improvement should also allow doctors to access information from the wards and offices on the compound via PDAs, laptops or PCs, which was considered rolling out in the future. In addition, the expansion provides some real time collaboration and communication among doctors and eminently enhances productivity. The network expansion of the hospital also greatly reduced the possibility of losing files, which ultimately hinders diagnosis and the quality of care.