Colorado facility rolls out VoIP system for phones, data.
Chad Landry, director of information services and telecommunications at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood, Colo., credits the nurses for sparking the wireless VoIP system that is now available to more than half of the hospital’s 2,035 employees.
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“They wanted wireless phones so that when they paged a physician, he could call them right back and not have to be transferred through the main desk,” Landry says.
At first the hospital considered a 900-MHz system, but quickly found it to be kludgy and unable to integrate with other network components. “The phone size was awkward and in my opinion the technology was old and dying, and there were severe interference issues,” he says.
Landry realized the price of the 900-MHz system was within 10% of the $250,000 he would spend for infrastructure for the wireless VoIP network.
The allure of the project was strong. “We could kill two birds with one stone: voice over IP and electronic administration of data records over the same wireless access point,” he says. He adds that patient families, employees and physicians could access the Internet over the wireless network.
Landry was excited to see that the technology – a combination of Cisco gear and software and phones from SpectraLink and Cisco on an 802.11g network – had matured over the past few years. “If I had looked at this seven or eight years ago, I wouldn’t have done it,” he says. But security, reliability and availability had improved.
However, to be safe and to abide by federal and hospital regulations, Landry runs the wireless network separate from the hospital network. He also authenticates traffic through RADIUS and uses Wired Equivalent Privacy to encrypt voice communications.
The most difficult part of the rollout was educating hospital administration about the costs and benefits, Landry says. “I had to teach them about redundant routers, switching, on-call support and other technology,” he says.
He also had to ask everyone for patience. “You don’t roll out a voice over IP system and not expect to have issues.” To control the situation, he rolled out access to one unit at a time. “We met with the department for a week, found out their workflow and configured the phones accordingly. Then we’d go back the next week and do a staff training. The biggest thing was that we were available to solve problems during and after the deployment.”
The IT team started a hospitalwide user group so that all floors could get together for standardization. “Originally, when you went floor to floor, there were differences in how the technology was used,” he says.
One early snafu involved batteries. “The phone batteries needed to be charged each day, but there was no routine in place. We received a lot of complaints so we had to integrate the charging into the workflow.”
Today, more than 240 wireless VoIP phones are in use at the hospital by a cross-section of departments, including radiology, and Landry is activating new features all the time. “Now, we have a wireless paging system that can send text messages to the phone and employees’ families can contact them without them having to leave their patients.”
Gittlen is a freelance technology editor in Massachusetts. She can be reached at sgittlen@charter.net.
