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About
INNOVATOR 2005: University of Miami
7/28/2005
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Miami, a pervasive WLAN significantly
improves medical education and provides truly mobile patient care.
| INNOVATION: | INNOVATOR: |
|---|---|
| Pervasive WLAN for Medical Education and Healthcare Delivery | University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine / Meru Networks |
Challenge
As a major academic medical center, University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and the university’s Jackson Memorial Medical Center recognized early on the significant role of wireless networks in supporting the delivery of healthcare, education, and research activities. By enabling timely communications, a mobilized workforce, and providing real-time access to patient data, WLANs could improve overall patient care and increase the efficiency of healthcare delivery through better resource management and more streamlined administrative procedures. Additionally, with the blurring of lines between biomedical and IT disciplines, the university’s medical and medical education facilities saw the need to migrate to a pervasive WLAN deployment that could take full advantage of this convergence.Technology Choice/Project Design
With millions of square feet of classroom, hospital, clinic, laboratory, and administrative space to cover, wireless networking would be a strong supplement to traditional cabled infrastructure, to provide network access. The medical school and hospital looked at several WLAN technologies and needed to find a product that was easy to deploy, required minimal maintenance, and minimized the site surveys required. Additionally, administrators knew they needed real-time rogue access point (AP) detection and mitigation capabilities. Standards, scalability, and extensibility were also key factors in choosing a wireless technology for the mobile healthcare strategy. The Miller School of Medicine is large, with many departmental moves and changes from one facility to the next. Administrators needed a platform that could easily support these constant shifts in density and coverage requirements.
Support for future applications was another key concern. The selected infrastructure had to meet the rigorous demands of current and future hospital applications, ranging from wireless patient charting systems and mobile EKG machines—beds that monitor patient vital statistics and relay them to nurse stations— to wireless video transmissions that educate patients about their health issues.
The WLAN initiative team eventually selected Meru Networks (www.merunetworks.com), because the entire Meru WLAN system could operate on one channel to deliver converged voice, data, and even video services with automatic coverage optimization and load balancing, to compensate for shifting user density and application loads.
