From the mHealthNews archive
It wasn’t too long ago that hospitals were a no-cell zone. But just as quickly as they became wireless hot spots, the pressure to move mountains of data through over-taxed networks has begun to spiral.
“In-building wireless” is likely to be a challenge for hospital IT departments for the foreseeable future. And that is familiar turf to Bryce Bregen, vice president of sales and marketing at Connectivity Wireless who will be explaining the in-building wireless landscape at the HIMSS Media mHealth Summit (2:30 - 3:30 PM on Tuesday, December 10th).
One way to chart the explosion of in-building wireless across the country is to look at Connectivity’s own growth: It was recently named the 17th fastest growing telecommunications company in the country, and it has added over 150 employees and opened eight offices in the last five years.
While the growth is impressive, it’s not necessarily surprising. As Bregen put it, “it’s now unacceptable for a customer not to be able to make a phone call across the country.” And that means even in locations like airports, hospitals, universities, and sprawling corporate complexes, all the places that are clamoring for wall-to-wall in-building wireless.
As Bregen explained it, the main reason patients and visitors weren’t allowed to make cellphone calls even a few years ago was largely because the only infrastructure available were the unlicensed wi-fi networks provided by carriers such as Verizon and AT&T. Given limited bandwidth, the priority for hospitals was naturally on ensuring that doctors could use wireless networks for medical reasons without having to share a dramatically slower system with nonessential users.
Now, of course, with ubiquitous cell phones, as well as smartphone and tablets, it’s more important than ever for doctors and other healthcare providers to be able to move anywhere in the hospital without losing wireless access.
In his presentation, Bregen will both review the recent past of in-building wireless -- which is also known as “Distributed Antenna Systems,” or DAS -- and look to the future. While 4G LTE is currently the standard, Bregen anticipates that the next generation of wireless, 5G, will be unveiled in the United States by 2016 or 2017.
And 5G will be a game changer, he suggested, as it will enable providers to pull up and use any kind of information, including heavy bandwidth tasks such as video files, from any source in any location. And that will have potentially dramatic implications for the use of an array of mHealth applications and telemedicine services.
In addition to expanding the use of mHealth technologies, Bregen said the move to 5G will enable hospitals and other in-building wireless users to manage their overall bandwidth more efficiently.
“They’ll be looking to offload traffic so as to be able to operate their businesses better,” he said, going on to explain that for medical facilities that will involve more effectively separating patient or guest bandwidth use from provider use.
For more information on this and other mHealth Summit presentations, visit the mHealth Summit website
