* Hospital recalls early lessons with location tracking
If you read the last newsletter, you’ll know that Rockford Memorial Hospital in Rockford, Ill., hopes to use Wi-Fi-based asset location tracking to take a chomp out of the $1.5 million in annual productivity losses it attributes to searching for mobile equipment.
If you read the last newsletter , you’ll know that Rockford Memorial Hospital in Rockford, Ill., hopes to use Wi-Fi-based asset location tracking to take a chomp out of the $1.5 million in annual productivity losses it attributes to searching for mobile equipment.
It has partially deployed a system combining the PanGo Networks PanGo Locator application, Cisco 1100 and 1200 series access points, and Four Rivers asset management software. Joe Granneman, Rockford Memorial’s manager of networking and data security and HIPAA security officer, says the location-tracking system’s ability to use the hospital’s existing Wi-Fi network to communicate location information to the application sealed the deal.
Earlier tracking systems used infrared-based technology and readers with specially cabled overlay networks that would have cost a quarter of a million dollars to install. “The healthcare community just doesn’t have that to spend, regardless of the potential savings,” Granneman says.
The existing cabled communications network couldn’t be used for transporting asset-tracking information because of interference problems with the older technology, explains Gary Bayston, manager of biomedical engineering.
Granneman notes that with the Wi-Fi setup, “security was tricky.” The PanGo tags available when the project got underway supported 802.11 Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption, which wasn’t strong enough to meet hospital policy. So the hospital created a custom Wi-Fi virtual LAN (VLAN) for asset tracking that can’t see any other applications, such as the hospital information system or pharmacy system. The Cisco 1100 and 1200 access points each support six different service set identifiers (SSID), each with different security profiles, Granneman explains.
The next release of PanGo tags, due late this year, are scheduled to support stronger encryption – Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), according to PanGo. However, a company spokesperson says, “WPA association takes more time and as a result eats up more battery power. Changing batteries too often can be labor-intensive, so generally our customers don’t ask for WPA for asset tracking.”
Granneman was glad he built the Wi-Fi network with 50% coverage overlap in anticipation of supporting voice over IP (VoIP), because location accuracy is closely tied to how many access points a tag can hear, he says.
He adds that he discovered that the dynamic power allocation mode supported by Cisco access points – and those made by other vendors – must be disabled to work with location tracking. Location is determined by a signal-strength table built during a location site survey, and dynamic power allocation (whereby if an access point fails, those around it compensate), throws accuracy off, he explains.
