COMMENT: Driving cost efficiency in the NHS with wireless technology
PERRY CORRELL, principle technologist at Xirrus, examines how wireless technology can help NHS trusts improve patient care, reduce paperwork and save valuable time
WITH the NHS constantly forced to drive down costs, technology can be a great enabler, if the right infrastructure can be put in place. Wireless technology is transforming the way in which hospitals operate as new Wi-Fi deployments across hospitals in the UK enable doctors and clinicians to use mobile devices to improve patient care, save time and improve efficiencies.
As a case in point, a wireless network has recently been installed at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust in Liverpool. After completion, the trust performed a time and motion study and found it was saving an average of 64 minutes per nurse, per shift by using wireless-based bedside prescribing and record keeping. The network saves the nurses from having to walk back and forth between the patient and the central nursing station to input the patient and prescription details.
Across various wards throughout NHS hospitals in the UK, wireless technology is enabling new applications such as electronic prescriptions
If you consider the size of the hospital and the number of nurses, this time saving equates too many thousands of nurse hours per year which, in return, easily justifies the cost of deploying the wireless network. Furthermore, by fulfilling the prescription and data input at the bedside, it significantly reduces the risk of mistakes that could happen if a nurse is interrupted between prescribing a drug to a patient and inputting the details into the patient records at a central nursing station.
Across various wards throughout NHS hospitals in the UK, wireless technology is enabling new applications such as electronic prescriptions, where nurses and other staff members make use of single user sign-on schemes, which have been shown to improve staff efficiency. A host of applications, such as RFID tagging and voiceover Wi-Fi, are designed to improve patient care and the efficiency of hospital services.
Use of RFID technology is also increasingly being used for equipment tracing, but Alder Hey, for example, has taken it one step further and is using RFID wristbands to protect newborn babies. If a baby is removed from a ward without authorisation, not only can the baby’s whereabouts be tracked using the wireless network, but also, since the network is connected to the hospital’s physical access system, a security alert is raised and, as a result, doors will automatically seal so the baby cannot be taken outside of the hospital.
IT decision-makers across NHS hospitals are recognising that by deploying a wireless network, an initial cost investment is required, but long-term savings are possible
Another example of how a wireless network can transform a hospital’s IT infrastructure is by the amount of ultrasound images being transferring by hospital staff via the WLAN in real time. If you considerer that an average of 90,000 scans per month are carried out in a typical neonatal ward, this equates to significant improvements in the time saved by sending them over a wired network. This means that, if hospitals are deploying an 802.11n Wi-Fi network, with 11n clients, they could benefit from unparalleled speed and performance and can transfer data with speeds up to 300Mbps, which is much faster than the older 802.11a/b/g wireless networks of 54Mbps. One of the largest advantages of a high-speed network is sending large video files, which are around 150MB in file size and are bandwidth hungry, taking several minutes longer if they were to be sent over a wired connection.
The combined cost of a network port and installation of a cable run in the NHS is currently around £1,000 per drop. This is why IT decision-makers across NHS hospitals are recognising that by deploying a wireless network, an initial cost investment is required, but long-term savings are possible. This will not only future-proof the facility, but it will, in fact, also result in large cost savings, especially in cable runs and switch ports. If we refer to Alder Hey again, the trust was also saving 66,751 kWh power per year.