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Bluesocket

Winchester Hospital has provided quality healthcare for more than 90 years, andis one of three percent of the nation’s hospitals to receive Magnet Recognitionfor its nursing program. In selecting a wireless solution, Bluesocket, Inc. wasthe clear choice for its security, manageability, and flexibility.

Situated just minutes from Boston, Winchester Hospital specializes in a number of major clinical specialties, including surgery, pediatrics, and Level II neonatal intensive care. The hospital also boasts an award-winning nursing staff that is obsessed with point-of-patient care. To enhance patient care, hospital administrators unanimously chose a BlueSecureTM 2100 Controller as the hub of an expanding medical information network.

Winchester Hospital

Located approximately 12 miles north of Boston, Winchester Hospital is the leading provider of health care service within a 12 community service area. Although it is smaller than the larger teaching hospitals scattered throughout the Massachusetts’ capital city, when it comes to patient care, dedication of the nursing staff and the use of technology that brings medical services closer to the bedside and point-of-patient contact, this 200-bed institution can keep pace with any hospital in the nation.

In fact, in 2003 the American Nurses Association (ANA) awarded Winchester Hospital Magnet Recognition, which is the group’s highest honor for excellence in nursing. Winchester was the first community hospital in Massachusetts to achieve "Magnet" status, and shares this honor with Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, Dana Farber and Jordan Hospital as the only hospitals in the state to earn this achievement. Magnet Recognition also acknowledges hospitals that are able to attract and retain the best nursing professionals, and has been earned by less than three percent of all U.S. hospitals.

So, it was no surprise that when Winchester Hospital administrators decided to add wireless access to a clinical documentation system launched in early 2004, that patient care, reliable access, and security were the top requirements in selecting and implementing the network. Working with a systems integrator, the Winchester Hospital management and technical staff selected a Bluesocket wireless solution since it easily met all the initial requirements and was simple and easy to manage.

“We did some internal homework regarding wireless solutions and who to partner with from an equipment standpoint,” says Gerald Greeley, Chief Information Officer at Winchester Hospital. “Security was a main concern, especially how to control who was getting on the network and who was not permitted on the network. We also wanted to make sure that whatever solution we picked was going to be simple to administer.”

The Challenge for Winchester Hospital

The primary goal in deploying the wireless solution was to extend the hospital’s Meditech patient information system directly to patients at the more than 200-bed healthcare facility. “Anything available on a desktop computer at a nurse’s station, we wanted to be available mobile as well to a nurse or physician,” adds Greeley.

Plans for the wireless network and its rollout would also coincide with the development of a Web-based case management system and an existing system already in use by hospital pharmacists. To help architect the wireless network, hospital administrators turned to SideBand Systems, Inc., a systems integrator based in Beverly, MA with extensive experience in designing secure in-building wireless networks.

The SideBand team recommended the Bluesocket solution and worked with the hospital’s IT staff to deploy a BlueSecure 2100 Controller as the hub in a wireless network that presently includes 29 Cisco 1200 access points (APs), more than 40 wireless computers-on-wheels (COWs), and a dozen or more laptops used by case managers and on-site pharmacists.

The Bluesocket Solution

SideBand began the project by assessing the hospital’s core needs in terms of wireless access and on-the-fly patient documentation. This included a review of the types of applications that would operate on the wireless network, bandwidth requirements, and the number and types of users of the planned system. The company also did a full analysis of the hospital as it planned for the placement of wireless APs to assure optimum signal coverage.

Structuring the wireless network to focus primarily on point-of-patient care needs was the most important, and potentially the most troublesome aspect in the planning process, relates CIO Greeley. SideBand and the hospital technical staff spent a lot of time talking to doctors and nurses, asking them what they needed to enhance their healthcare procedures and evaluating what types of client systems would work best.

“The reliability of the entire wireless network has been outstanding,” said CIO Greeley. “The hospital recently had a HIPAA1 review and the system received rave reviews for security, saying that our WiFi network is very well protected and secure.”

In launching the wireless network, Winchester Hospital put a lot of time and effort into user training and ‘handholding’, since it was realized early on that if not done right the technology could create problems for a nursing staff already at the very top of its game in terms of patient care.

The hospital hopes to expand the use of the wireless network and clinical documentation system from simple patient assessments to real-time electronic medication tracking and sophisticated Bedside Medication Verification (BMV) using scanners and coded patient wrist bands. Plans are to roll out such a system this Fall, and piggyback that effort on top of the existing BlueSecure Controller.

“With all the different projects going on, it’s nice to know that with Bluesocket’s ‘painless security’, we haven’t had to give a whole lot of attention to the wireless network itself,” says Greeley.