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Convergence for critical care

MetroHealth converges voice and data over wireless IP, delivering better care for more patients — without increasing staff size.

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During emergency heart surgery at MetroHealth System's new Critical Care Pavilion, a patient's vital signs go haywire. The anesthesiologist needs expert advice, and fast. He hits a button on a wireless phone strapped to his waist and is instantly connected to the department chief, who simultaneously conferences in other anesthesiologists. After this quick verbal consult - during which he never leaves the patient's side - the anesthesiologist makes a small adjustment, the patient stabilizes and the operation is a success.

Life-saving real-time collaborative scenarios such as this have become commonplace at MetroHealth System since the Cleveland healthcare group opened its CCP in June 2004. Near the established medical center, the CCP features an emergency department and 17 surgical suites tied together via a state-of-the-art wireless data and VoIP system.

With the CCP's opening, MetroHealth doubled its space and tripled the number of monitored beds. Staff size, however, did not change. This meant that simply extending the medical center's Gigabit Ethernet backbone to the CCP wasn't going to be adequate, says Vince Miller, vice president and CIO at MetroHealth.

"We knew communications was going to be a big issue," he says. "We thought [VoIP] might be the answer." Besides VoIP, wireless made better business sense than giving the on-the-go emergency department and surgical staffs stationary connections to the hard-wired corporate network serving the facility.

So MetroHealth combined the two technologies to create a converged wireless network that has improved operations and patient care while serving about 70,000 critical care patients a year. As a result, MetroHealth - the only Level 1 trauma center serving the region - earns recognition as a 2005 Enterprise All-Star.

Eliminating the runaround

MetroHealth hasn't exactly been conventional with its wireless VoIP setup. For example, it doesn't use Cisco's CallManager IP PBX software, even though it does rely on the Cisco Catalyst 4507 switch at its core and 44 Cisco AP1210 access points. Instead, IT used its Nortel 1000 PBX as the base of its IP system, says Joan McFaul, director of IT infrastructure. "If we had gone all-Cisco, we would have had to put in two telecommunications systems. This way, we . . . retained our traditional telecom" infrastructure while implementing wireless VoIP, she says.