From the mHealthNews archive
According to Ali Youssef, senior clinical mobile solutions architect at the Detroit, Mich.-based Henry Ford Health System, building and maintaining an adequate wireless network amounts to aiming at a constantly moving target, especially in the healthcare sector.
“You can’t predict what’s coming in the future,” he said. “Mobile is a very disruptive technology. For example, you couldn’t predict the emergence of the iPhone or iPad.”
Along with his presentation, “Are you ready for Wi-Fi and mHealth?”, Youseff will be participating in a panel discussion titled "View, Download, Transmit" from 1:15-2:15 p.m. Wednesday, December 11, at the HIMSS Media mHealth Summit in Arlington, VA. He’ll talk about his experience planning and implementing the health system's wireless network – which includes expanding coverage from 4 million to 8 million square feet and taking into account the requirements of a new, enterprise-wide EMR system.
In particular, he’s going to focus on the challenges of provisioning bandwidth appropriately to all devices.
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It’s when you begin to consider the range of constituencies using a hospital wireless network that the complexity becomes clear.
According to Youssef, the majority of wireless users at HFHS are guests. They can only be allotted so much bandwidth, as the most important users are the doctors, other caregivers and lab technicians who need bandwidth for everything from their personal smartphones and tablets to x-ray machines to enterprise-level PACS.
In Youssef’s experience, one of the keys to ensuring adequate bandwidth is regular contact with clinicians.
“Vendors have direct access to clinicians,” he noted, “so they can pitch a product pretty easily.”
That may not be a problem if the clinician is working within a predetermined enterprise budget, but Youssef said that if, for example, the clinician is working with grant money, wireless managers can suddenly find themselves having to accommodate a significant draw on their bandwidth that they had not anticipated.
“I’ve found that you really have to meet with clinicians from different departments (on a regular basis) and then try to develop your architecture around what their goals are.”
There are some general guidelines network architects can follow to ensure effective continuity, including planning a high level of system redundancy, conducting proper site surveys and keeping tabs on the kinds of devices that are going to be used, while also testing them to see how they behave on the network.
And then, of course, there are security considerations, which Youssef said involve always making sure you’re abiding by the ever-changing regulations.
For more information on this and other sessions, visit the HIMSS Media mHealth Summit website.
