SUNNYVALE, Calif. –Halifax Health's new 500,000-square-foot state-of-the-art medical facility in Daytona Beach, Fla., will open this week equipped with a high-performance wireless LAN from Meru Networks aimed at increasing medical professionals' mobility, productivity and accuracy as they treat patients.
The Meru virtual cell WLAN, based on the latest 802.11n wireless standard, will span all 10 floors of the new North Tower, including 180 private rooms and a 89,000-square-foot Emergency Department containing the area's only Trauma Center. It will provide connectivity for "Workstations on Wheels" mobile workstations that support such applications as electronic medical records (EMR), bedside bar-code scanning for drug-dosage verification, and remote video interpreting for hard-of-hearing patients.
Meru's next-generation virtual-cell WLAN platform outperformed other vendors' micro-cell architectures in a live test Halifax Health set up to evaluate performance, voice-data roaming capabilities, ease of operation, and equipment and maintenance costs for wireless in the North Tower, according to Tripp Sills, network architect.
Test Shows Meru Has Seamless Handoffs, No Disruptive 'Hard Roam'
"Many of our key mobile applications -- Meditech EMR, Motion C5 tablets for clinical data entry, Siemens VoIP phones, LifeLinks remote video interpreting – are highly delay-sensitive yet need 100 percent availability," Sills said. "If nurses on mobile workstations lose their connection while entering EMR data, they'll have to reenter it from the beginning, losing valuable time. The consequences could be even more serious if clinicians can't use their mobile tablets to scan a patient's wristband and medical chart to ensure that medication is administered properly. 802.11n gives us the high bandwidth these applications need, but the assurance of seamless roaming is equally important, especially as we continue to roll out our VoIP solutions."
Halifax Health had previously deployed conventional "micro cell" WLANs in the other buildings on its campus, but had experienced problems with channel interference and disconnections while roaming. As a result, the organization decided to take another look at WLAN vendors in preparation for opening the North Tower, with its advanced treatment facilities and multimedia applications. Meru's unique "virtual cell" approach met with some initial skepticism, Sills said. "But Meru had scored well in analyst reports, and we'd heard from a number of Meru customers that 'all the marketing statements are true!'
"After our testing, we realized that the virtual cell approach, which allows all Meru access points to be on the same channel and share a common BSSID – and for the controller to dictate which access points a given client connects to – leads to huge benefits in terms of roaming and elimination of interference. With micro cell, the client device itself selects an AP and 'sticks' to it, causing a 'hard roam' in which the client perceives a distinct disconnection from one AP and reconnection to another. That's unacceptable in a healthcare setting, where applications are sensitive and timing is everything."
Easy to Manage: No RF Experts Required on Staff
Meru also stood out from the pack in its ease of deployment and management. "Our initial vendor 'bakeoff' was intended to last one day," Sills said. "The Meru network was set up, fully demonstrated and torn down easily in the time allowed. The other vendors, with their micro cell approaches, had to stay an extra day because their systems took so much more time just to set up and configure. Knowing that was important because we wanted a wireless system which didn't force us to hire RF technical experts, but which existing network engineers and system administrators could set up and maintain."
The WLAN deployment in Halifax Health's North Tower includes approximately 175 Meru AP311 dual-radio access points; each AP has one 802.11n radio and one 802.11a/b/g radio (software-upgradeable to 11n). Two MC4100 controllers provide centralized intelligent RF management for all access points on the network.
Future plans call for the Meru WLAN to support the use of Vocera wearable voice communication badges using Wi-Fi, as well as dual-mode telephones supporting both cellular and Wi-Fi communication.
About Halifax Health
Building on an 80-year history of exceptional medical diagnostic and treatment services in East Central Florida, Halifax Health is ranked among the top five percent of all hospitals in the nation for clinical outcomes. Within an expanding network of specialized healthcare services at Halifax Health is a tertiary hospital, community hospital, psychiatric services, a cancer treatment center with four outreach locations, the area's largest hospice, and Florida's largest Emergency Department. Halifax Health offers the area's only Level II Trauma Center, Comprehensive Stroke Center, Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Units, Pediatric Emergency Department, Child and Adolescent Behavioral Services, and Neurosurgical Services. Widely recognized for its outstanding medical staff and leading-edge technology, Halifax Health consistently receives top statewide and national ratings for its specialties, including orthopedics, spinal surgery, stroke services, vascular services, and cardiology. In 2008, the organization was also ranked #2 among the Top 100 Companies for Working Families (Orlando Sentinel).
About Meru Networks
Founded in 2002, Meru Networks develops and markets wireless LAN infrastructure solutions that use virtualization to deliver pervasive, high-fidelity wireless service for business-critical voice, video and data applications. The company first introduced its award-winning virtual cell wireless architecture in 2003, and Meru products embody a complete departure from typical hub-based WLAN approaches, offering a wireless solution with levels of performance, reliability, security and cost-effectiveness previously found only in wired networking environments. Meru's solutions have been adopted in all major industry vertical markets, including Fortune 500 enterprises, healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and government. Meru is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and has operations in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. |