Royal Brompton deploys Alcatel-Lucent WLAN

Tuesday 14th October 2008

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust, the internationally-renowned heart and lung centre, has deployed an Alcatel-Lucent Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) to form the core component of its IT strategy, which aims to transform clinical care and enable total mobility of its patient services.

Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent's wireless network, which was installed by networking and security integrator Khipu Networks, gives trust employees the ability to perform clinical procedures and access patient information anywhere in the hospital, as well as supporting the organisation's goal of providing "paper-light" electronic access to all clinical, managerial and administrative records by 2010/2011.

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS trust, which comprises two hospitals 20 miles apart at Chelsea and Uxbridge, London, will utilise the wireless network to deliver sensitive data that requires resilience, security and speed – such as X-ray images, patient monitoring information, pathology results and cardiovascular imaging.

It allows the staff, equipped with tablet PCs such as Mobile Clinical Assistants (MCAs), to record medical information direct from patients' wristbands or at their bedsides, and transmit it into a central database, crucial in ensuring fast and accurate patient identification and diagnosis.

"Hospitals operate in a totally mobile way. Clinicians, nurses and patients are continually on the move, and in order to deliver effective care, staff must be granted universal access to patient data," said Graham Everson, director of IT and telecommunications at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS trust.

"Wireless technology perfectly supports the core clinical functions of a hospital, and thus forms the bedrock of our IT strategy. Most importantly, it is an enabler – on top of it, you can build layers of device and functionality to make day to day operations more dynamic and flexible, reducing patient risk in the process."

Royal Brompton & Harefield has future plans to link the telecommunications at both sites using voice over IP (VoIP) to remove the cost of internal calls, as well as giving staff GSM devices with wireless capabilities, enabling them to automatically switch over to the Wi-Fi network whenever they're onsite, achieving further flexibility and cost-savings.

The trust is also examining the deployment of "hands free", location monitoring and communication technology. Vocera technology can be seen as a powerful replacement for traditional hospital "bleep" systems, as it provides devices that do not need their own independent "network", but instead work via the hospital's WLAN. This allows for two-way voice communication using voice recognition to locate the "target audience" – individual or group – within the hospital. The system has direct operational benefits to clinical and nursing staff, security staff and portering staff, and can be used to improve workflow efficiency of the trust employees across each of the sites at the hospital.

"Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS trust is a dynamic organisation in which excellence in clinical innovation is matched equally by technical innovation. It puts patient care at the heart of new communications projects, understands the importance of connected knowledge and ensures deployments are sufficiently robust to prevent care from being compromised by technical issues," said Simon Price, account manager, Alcatel-Lucent enterprise activities for UK & Ireland.

Alcatel-Lucent