RICHMOND, VA – Today’s hospitals are being designed with mobility in mind, making it essential that physicians and nurses have access to patient data at a moment’s notice from anywhere in the facility. The advent of wireless networks and devices makes that possible, but the system can’t be effective unless it’s reliable.

InnerWireless, a Richardson, Texas-based provider of end-to-end, in-building, converged wireless platforms, is making its mark in this arena with Horizon, the company’s distributed antenna system (DAS) that hosts a wide range of wireless solutions, including Cisco WLAN (Wi-Fi). The platform was implemented at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center’s Critical Care Hospital when it opened in late 2008.

“We have had virtually no issues,” said Greg Johnson, chief technology officer and director of technology and engineering services for the VCU Health System, who estimated one-third of the 1 million feet of wireless capacity at the campus is contained in the new hospital. “We made sure everything was tested well in advance, and we have all sorts of systems, all of them riding over the DAS.”

Gary Close, senior vice president of marketing for InnerWireless, says 95 percent of the nation’s hospitals use wireless tools or networks, and many of them have more than a half-dozen different networks. Many hospitals, he said, use discrete systems to manage each network, and the industry is slowly learning about converged systems like Horizon.

“In general, the market hasn’t been exposed to its merits,” he said. “Is it controversial? Yes. It’s not necessarily a better way but certainly an alternative. … But as new hospitals are being built and old ones are being upgraded, delivering all of those wireless services on a single platform, rather than building another system for the IT department to manage, is preferable.”

At VCU’s new hospital, the InnerWireless platform manages the nurse call system developed by Rauland Borg, as well as the Ascom voice-over-IP communications system, the Emergin alarm management and automated event notification system and IntelliVue medical telemetry system from Philips Healthcare and more than 300 mobile computers that link into the Cerner HIS.

Johnson said the DAS platform is especially beneficial to nurses, many of whom had to learn to adapt to wireless technology.

“Nurses are more mobile within the new critical care hospital,” said Heather Craven, a nurse clinician in the acute care medicine department at the VCU Health System. “They are responsible for managing the same number of patients spread out over a physical floor space three times larger than the old facility. Nurses do not have time or luxury to make unnecessary trips to the nursing station to respond to overhead pages or play telephone tag with physicians which may negatively impact patient care.”

Johnson said the rest of the VCU Medical Center campus, including the emergency department and some surgical suites, operates on discrete systems and is plagued by gaps in service.

“People immediately notice the degradation of service (when they leave the new hospital),” he said.