A press release yesterday from Trapeze Networks caught my eye. Basically, they're announcing a renewed marketing thrust into one of the two (the other is education) "low-hanging fruit" markets for enterprise-class WLANs, featuring an emphasis on reliability, channel programs (making their dealers productive in healthcare), and a new Medical Customer Advisory Council - all of these good ideas. But what's really interesting here is how the focus of Trapeze (and, to be fair, most of the other vendors selling equipment in their class) on healthcare might affect the whole debate over health insurance and healthcare still raging in this country. Is wireless really going to help?
There are two core issues here - access and cost (quality is a given), the two being directly related by the size of the insurance pool present in any given case, along with many other factors. Healthcare costs are now artificially high because everyone gets healthcare regardless of whether one has insurance or the ability to pay, so those fortunate (or not) enough to be able to afford insurance have the questionable responsibility for paying for everyone not so fortunate. The face value of this situation is largely a function of one's specific politics, but it should be noted here that this only deals with half of the problem - demand. It can therefore be argued, and, indeed, it should be, that a focus on the demand side in insufficient, and we need to examine opportunities for cost savings on the supply side as well. Jus as we need to lower demand by seeing that the nation is healthy and getting healthier still, we also need to improve efficiency in providing services - an area where IT has traditionally been only marginally successful.
I recently spent a weekend in a hospital running benchmarks on a wireless LAN system, the goal being to evaluate its performance in the rugged, high-demand, mission-critical environment that hospitals always represent. I was constantly reminded over the almost 30 hours that we actually worked just how important getting this right was. People's lives, quite literally, depend upon these systems. And it wasn't hard, subsequently, to examine ROI and find that, again quite literally, running a modern hospital would be impossible without wireless, let alone much more expensive (again, given today's costs, as hard as that might be to believe). Access to information, and the ability to update it in real time, when and where required, on a wide variety of subscriber units, improves productivity, increases customer satisfaction, and, yes, lowers costs. What's really needed at this point, though, isn't so much innovation in wireless technology alone (although we were, in this case, specifically testing 802.11n in healthcare apps), but rather serious advances on the back end - standards for healthcare records, databases, and data interchange. That's where the money really is, and that's not my area of expertise.
But it's clear that WLANs are going to play an increasingly important role in healthcare environments regardless. I would expect, say, within as few as five years, that a hospital without an enterprise-wide WLAN will be very rare indeed. And maybe, just maybe, they'll make at least a small contribution toward the cost reductions that we so obviously require today.
Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.
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