Hospital Uses Wireless LAN to Speed Up Emergency Room Registration1

 
Indiana’s Methodist Hospital installed Proxim’s RangeLAN2 wireless communications
technology to enable faster patient intake in the emergency room. The new system
gives medical staff the ability to take patients straight back to the treatment rooms,
giving them immediate treatment and more privacy in divulging insurance information
and medical problems.
Methodist Hospital of Indianapolis, Indiana, is an 1,100-bed private hospital with a
45-bed emergency room that features a state-approved, Level-1 trauma center.
Approximately 85,000–90,000 patients pass through the hospital’s emergency room
each year, and many are in need of immediate treatment. For these patients, there’s
no time to wait in a room full of people while a registration clerk collects information
on the reason for the visit, type of insurance coverage, and health history.
Sometimes information must be recorded as the patient is being transported to a
room, or even while being treated.
To expedite the registration process, Methodist Hospital worked with Datacom for
Business, a value-added reseller based in Champaign, Illinois. As a result, the hospital
remodeled its 65,000-square-foot emergency room, eliminating all but two registration
tables and replacing the rest with Compaq Contura notebook computers outfitted
with wireless LAN adapters. Now patients can go directly to treatment rooms,
where registration clerks gather the necessary intake data and enter it into the database
on the host computer.
Methodist Hospital’s wireless communications are made possible by RangeLAN2/PCMCIA
adapters from Proxim, Inc. The wireless PCMCIA adapters enable the Compaq
notebook computers running TN3270 terminal emulation to access the clinic’s existing
wired client/server network or communicate on a peer-to-peer basis with other
mobile systems within the same clinic site. The adapters operate at an average power output of about 100 milliwatts and use
advanced power management to minimize the drain on the mobile systems’ batteries.
RangeLAN2 provides transparent access to standard wired LAN environments,
including the hospital’s existing TCP/IP network. This is accomplished through the use
of three Proxim RangeLAN2/Access Points, which act as wireless bridges and enable
mobile users anywhere in the emergency room to send information to the Telnet LAN
server. The terminal emulation is then transferred in real-time over a TCP/IP enterprise
backbone to the hospital’s database in the mainframe computer.