The federal government's requirements for hospitals and health care facilities to transition to electronic medical records has prompted health care management company Clear Choice Healthcare to swap out its Cisco equipment at nine skilled nursing and assisted living facilities throughout Florida and one SNF in Denver. To support the leap to EMRs and deliver broadband access to patients and staff, Clear Choice has replaced its Cisco gear with a ZoneFlex 802.11n Smart WLAN system from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Ruckus Wireless. Read »

The Greater Regional Medical Center in Creston, Iowa, is stepping up its commitment to technology with the addition of a new dual wireless network that will offer public access to patients and visitors while granting physicians access through a secured network. Both networks will run over the same access points. Read »

Halifax Health Systems has snagged an InfoWorld 100 Award for deploying one of the 100 best information technology projects of 2009. Earlier this year, the facilitator of specialized healthcare services in East Central Florida deployed a wireless LAN with 802.11n technology as the foundation for wireless connectivity in its 500,000 square foot state-of-the-art medical facility in Daytona Beach. Read »

In a move to boost staff productivity and improve patient care at its four health care facilities in Westchester County, N.Y., Riverside Health Care System is implementing a wireless LAN from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aerohive Networks. The new wireless LAN has already been deployed at St. John's Riverside Hospital-Andrus Pavilion, where it supports a bedside documentation application and will soon support a variety of applications, including bedside registration, drug administration and verification, RFID patient tagging, and guest access. Read »

An 802.11n deployment at the Boston Medical Center (BMC) was impressive enough to snag wireless LAN and secure mobility solutions vendor Aruba Networks a 2009 Excellence Award from TMC's Internet Telephony magazine. Located in Beantown's South End, BMC is a 626-bed hospital and academic medical center that serves as the primary teaching affiliate for Boston University School of Medicine. It also ranks as the largest safety net hospital in New England, reaching into the community as a founding partner of Boston HealthNet, a network of 15 community health centers throughout Boston serving more than 250,000 people annually. Read »

Wireless health. mHealth. MPoC, etc. There's no shortage of monikers for what the industry is getting at here, so let's accept as a given the fact that the future of healthcare is altogether wireless. Eventually. Fluid, mobile, efficient; hopefully, less expensive. But not until the industry clears the interoperability hurdle, which is why I'm excited by the idea of the ZigBee Alliance and the Continua Health Alliance deepening their commitment to defining interoperable communication standards for personal health solutions on low-power local area networks. Read »

Earlier this month, the IEEE announced that its Standards Board had ratified the IEEE 802.11n-2009 amendment, defining mechanisms that provide much improved data rates and ranges for wireless local area networks (WLANs). Ratification of the amendment clears the way for the rollout of more scalable WLANs that deliver 10-fold-greater data rates than previously defined, while ensuring co-existence with legacy systems and security implementations. That's great news for healthcare, where 802.11n deployments are helping define what can be accomplished at the mobile point of care. Read »

Keep an eye on Sprint, which expects this year's post-paid and total subscriber full-year losses to be an improvement over 2008.  The provider of wireless and wireline communications services also anticipates a drop in capital expenditure, not counting its investment in WiMAX. Plus, the company just saw its Business Markets Group (BMG) make strong contributions in the second quarter to the company’s continued financial stability and improved customer experience, as it added new business and introduced new mobile products and services for healthcare and other business customers. Read »

Enterprise wireless LAN equipment and management software vendor Trapeze Networks has inked a distribution deal with TESSCO Technologies, a value-added provider of the product and supply chain solutions needed to design, build, run, maintain and use wireless systems. As a result of this agreement, Trapeze, which targets healthcare and other industries, will gain access to TESSCO's distribution channels. Read »

Europe's healthcare system is becoming increasingly digitized, but the wireless technology that's transforming business today has yet to be fully explored by the healthcare industry to support quality maintenance and improved efficiency.  Nevertheless, the popularity of wireless and handheld devices in the European healthcare arena is set to increase against a backdrop of tech-savvy patients and the obvious benefits of mobility and flexibility, according to new analysis from Frost & Sullivan. Read »