Secure Voice and Data Over Wi-Fi

Today, many healthcare organizations share a common vision: to give doctors, nurses and administrators a single, secure network over which they can transmit voice and data without huge operational expense and management complexity.

With hundreds of care providers continually on the move and the need to maximize staff productivity and minimize medical errors HCOs are seeking to enable information exchange among clinical staff and others through wireless-enabled COWs, data-driven patient care services such as bedside charting, patient monitoring and CPOE, or voice-driven systems such as VoIP and nurse call.

Importantly, these voice and data networks now combine essential functionality including:

* The ability to add capacity and throughput as demand increases -- especially important given the growing need to transmit large medical image files
* Enhanced network security that adds more protection at multiple levels to meet healthcare privacy standards such as HIPAA
* Support for a variety of different wireless devices, from VoIP phones to laptops, handheld PDAs to voice communication badges as well as legacy devices
* The ability to seamlessly support new applications such as safe drug administration and location tracking (RFID)
* Centralized network management so that user policies, security profiles for specific users or user groups, application deployment, etc., can all be performed efficiently, and effectively, from a single point

While nationwide health information network can bring data from disparate providers and organizations to the edge of a hospital's network, advances in internal voice and data networks are critical if the data is to travel the "last mile" to the patient's bedside or the HCO's business office.