What is the Connected Hospital?

The Connected Hospital is a vision that will take place within the next two decades.

The Connected Hospital is a vision of the future where hospitals can focus on providing the best quality of care to their patients while providing an efficient workplace for doctors, nurses, and everyone involved in the healthcare process. This vision stems from the increasing number of wireless medical devices in hospitals. Within the next 20 years, hospitals will be wirelessly connected, allowing for better patient care and better accounting for doctors and nurses.

Wireless technology is the keystone to the Connected Hospital, where patient safety, data accuracy, and mobility will all be fueled by technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  In the Connected Hospital, every device is connected and communicating with EHRs (Electronic Health Records) for accurate patient records and real-time data analysis. Within the Connected Hospital, nurses can monitor many patients remotely from one main station where they receive alerts and observe data captured each second on the patients’ health. Doctors can make more informed decisions with accurate and up-to-date patient information, leading to better patient outcomes. Patients and their families can feel safe knowing that they will always receive the correct dosage of the right medication, the greatest care from medical staff, and feel more comfortable not being tied down by wired medical devices.

Before the Connected Hospital can become a reality, there are some issues that hospitals and IT administrators should keep in mind when implementing the wireless hospital such as:

•    Connectivity of wireless medical devices

•    Security

•    RF interference

•    Client device requirements

Embedded Wireless Solutions from Laird ensures reliable connectivity for life-critical medical devices within a hospital and other medical ecosystems. For a medical device, a disruption of even a tenth of a second can cause a failure in the transmission of a continuous stream of data that might be critical to a patient’s care. Since medical devices place stringent requirements on wireless connections in hospitals, it is imperative that radios embedded in those medical devices are reliable.

The adoption of wireless technology in hospitals can be fueled by following best practices and learning from the experiences and “success stories” of other hospitals, where the benefits of wireless technology are not just theories but realized each day. Once everyone is in accordance on how to create a secure and reliable network, it will make the vision of a fully connected hospital a reality that much sooner.

For more in depth information, please visit Laird’s Connected Hospital webpage.

Discover the Benefits of the Connected Hospital in our new video, The Connected Hospital from Laird.