Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Palo Pinto General Hospital, a 99-bed healthcare facility, reportedly has selected and deployed an Extricom wireless LAN system to support the Hospital’s core mission of providing customer-centered, quality healthcare to the residents of Palo Pinto County.

 

Extricom (News - Alert) officials said that the system was implemented to help ease electronic medical record-keeping by mobile caregivers, specifically physician order management and medication verification applications.

 

It will also support a variety of other applications, including Kronos (News - Alert), PACS, Nihon Koden Telemetry Monitoring, and a VoIP-based Nurse Call system.

Company officials said that the push for conversion from paper-based records to EMR is a major trend in the healthcare field, and wireless LAN systems are an important component of the EMR adoption process. 

Wireless LANs give doctors and nurses real-time access to medical information directly at the patient bedside or anywhere in the hospital without the need to be tethered to a specific location to use a computer.

 

The result is maximized resource use, expedited, more-accurate care decisions that enhance patient outcomes.

 

Palo Pinto General Hospital is well along in its EMR compliance process, and the Extricom deployment will allow it to move to HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6, just short of full compliance, for the entire facility.

The Extricom solution was chosen after a detailed comparison of major wireless vendors.

 

“We looked at Cisco, Aruba, 3Com (News - Alert), Trapeze, which have cell-based architecture, and Extricom, which uses Channel Blanket architecture,” said Darrell Polston, network administrator for Palo Pinto Hospital.

 

Polston said that all of the cell-based solutions had the same issues: holes in wireless coverage and problematic support for wireless mobility, particularly in elevators.

 

“Many of our applications are heavily session-based, and loss of the connectivity could really impact productivity and patient care. So Extricom was the best fit for our needs,” he said.

 

Honoré Labourdette, Extricom’s VP of sales, North America, said that the deployment at Palo Pinto General Hospital is an important benchmark for Extricom as the company looks to expand its presence in the healthcare market.

 

“We see it as a showcase for how an Extricom solution can provide healthcare enterprises with the kind of highly reliable, future proof network infrastructure needed to ensure that EMR adoption programs achieve maximum value.”