The survey was conducted by InnerWireless last month.  170 participants provided the following responses:

• 55% indicated that cell service needed to be improved
• 46% indicated the Wi-Fi service needed to be improved
• 22% indicated that they had a DAS (others answered no, don’t know, what’s a DAS)
• 50% of those stating they had a DAS stated that cell service still needed to be improved
• 41% had building projects underway or in their future

My takeaway:
The healthcare vertical remains a very hot market for in-building DAS solutions, driven in large part by smartphones and cellular services. And when coupled with the amount of new healthcare building projects there is a great opportunity to improve key wireless services across the industry. I also found the survey result of 50% of those with a DAS stated that their cell service still needed to be improved concerning.

Could it be that not all DAS solutions and IBW partners are created equal?

Healthcare CIOs are facing real challenges today trying to support multiple mobile devices within a hospital. Whether a doctor is downloading an X-ray to a tablet, an EMT is communicating via a First Responder radio, or a patient is talking to loved ones on a mobile device, a reliable connection is critical.

This topic was front and center during the 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference in Las Vegas.

CommScope attended the HIMSS conference, and during the show, I took a few minutes to interview Bill Holman, senior vice president, InnerWireless.

InnerWireless at HIMSS InnerWireless is one of CommScope’s in-building wireless BusinessPartners. Bill and I discussed the topic of “mobile health” and deploying the right solution for healthcare facilities.

How important is connectivity in your healthcare facility?

The HIMSS12 Annual Conference and Exhibition is just around the corner.  Leading up to this event we have been looking at the impact and growth of wireless – especially in healthcare where DAS (distributed antenna system) is recognized as one of the key new technologies.  For hospitals, wireless has become mission-critical so let’s look at high-availability wireless in terms of Everything, Everywhere, Everytime.

Everything
For many hospitals, providing in-building wireless coverage has meant designing and installing as many as 5 separate wireless networks.  Every network is installed with different cabling and antennas, each requiring maintenance and surveillance.  In contrast, with a broadband DAS, one infrastructure can be RF designed and installed to deliver one, two or virtually every wireless that is consumed in today’s hospitals.

Everywhere
Wireless coverage and signal quality are not only hallmarks of high-availability wireless, but are performance measures that should be guaranteed.  Poor wireless coverage not only frustrates users and generates non-value added IT help desk calls, but it can also degrade overall system performance.  To an end user, wireless coverage is about the ability to use their wireless device of choice wherever they require in a facility.  To meet this expectation, a wireless solution should be designed to provide the required signal level via ubiquitous coverage for all wireless services in the facility.

Everytime
Wireless capacity and system reliability are the final cornerstones of a high-availability wireless solution.  With the increased adoption of smartphones, iPads and other devices, wireless device density is increasing concern.  While a user may have 5 bars of coverage, more and more wireless networks are becoming overloaded and unable to process traffic.  Wireless traffic management is key new strategy in maintaining connectivity and optimizing service levels over time to maximize a wireless investment.

Everything, Everywhere, Everytime.  For many hospitals, these are key attributes for a mission-critical wireless deployment.  Read about your colleagues experience in deploying DAS for key wireless services in a collection of newly published interviews:

• Carilion Clinic – Wireless: Strategic or just another cost?
• VCU Medical Center – Could wireless IT Help Desk calls be history?
• University Medical Center Southern Nevada – 24/7/365 Wi-Fi Availability?

We hope that we can then continue the conversation at HIMMS12.  We will be located in booth 4623 with our partner, CommScope, and ready to talk about DAS or other Black Box Network Services.

Michael Zachary, Director, IT Enterprise Architecture at Cook Chidren’s in Fort Worth, Texas offered a glimpse at how this growth is manifesting itself in healthcare.

Healthcare data applications, such as Computerized Physician Order Entry, Radiology PACS, Electronic Medical Records, and Bedside Medicine Verification and medical devices, including mobile carts, wireless IV, public safety, and VoIP devices, are all going wireless.  Add to this, the fact that everyone from physicians, to patients, to families, are bringing in their own devices, including smartphones, it is not uncommon to have 6, 8, or even 10 data-intensive wireless devices in a single room.

This density of devices, with numerous wireless technologies, including 3G/4G and Wi-Fi, is requiring hospitals to provide wireless networks that are fast, reliable, provide complete coverage, and enable complete mobility without interruption.

For Cook Children’s using a wireless infrastructure that supported 3G/4G, 802.11, paging, public safety, and two-way radio provided the answer.  One infrastructure, providing wall-to-wall coverage for every wireless frequency with optimized capacity for both 3G/4G and Wi-Fi provided the hospital with a wireless network that they could call medical grade.

Over the past several years there has been an increasing number of articles on DAS and it’s application in healthcare, but this is the first that has put DAS on equal footing as recognized must have healthcare applications, such as EHR:

As the article states, building a hospital with state-of-the-art information technology is harder than it looks, and these capabilities provide a new baseline. Congratulations to  two of InnerWireless’ customers, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Centura Health, for contributing to the article and most importantly leading the way in healthcare IT.

At the same time, in-building wireless solutions to support smartphones are increasing in popularity.  Why?  External wireless networks are meant to support 3G and 4G smartphones in the outside world and sometimes,  we all get lucky and have adequate support indoors.  But for mission-critical wireless, Distributed Antenna Systems are required to overcome in-building wireless challenges and provide smartphone access that is required in healthcare, Fortune 500, public venues, hospitality, and government facilities:

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) are becoming increasingly popular to support wide-area services, including 3G/4G cellular, but can a DAS be used to support Wireless LAN (WLAN) as well – thereby creating a network that can fully support the devices?

This is a question that generates a lot of debate.

Background: Not all Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) use the same architecture or support all wireless services.  While all DAS vendors support wide area services, support for WLAN varies greatly. Some vendors do not support WLAN at all, some only support 802.11b/g, some add in support for 802.11a, and only a very few support 802.11n. In most of these cases, vendors that support WLAN on DAS create a one-to-one mapping between access points and DAS antennas – touting benefits, such as centralized/secure access points and reduced cabling, but making newer technologies, such as 802.11n with MIMO, difficult and costly to implement. With minimal value, it is simplest to say, “Deploy a DAS for 3G/4G cellular and a separate discrete micro-cellular network for WLAN”.

But traditional WLAN is not perfect and the explosion of converged devices are amplifying issues related to coverage and capacity.  Enter Layered WLAN (L-WLAN).

InnerWireless: InnerWireless enables a network that supports both wide area services and WLAN.  For wide area services, InnerWireless deploys a fiber-coax DAS – Horizon4G. For WLAN, InnerWireless deploys L-WLAN – a broadband, remote antenna solution with channel layering to support all 802.11 capabilities, including 802.11n with MIMO and special streaming.  Creating a mission-critical WLAN with the following attributes:

• Coverage Segment – Engineered placement of remote, broadband antennas yields a seamless RF layer with assured coverage and high signal quality in line with the most demanding Wi-Fi clients – voice handsets, data/video tablets, and medical devices. InnerWireless avoids the artificial boundaries that traditional micro-cellular wireless LAN systems impose, letting client devices move freely throughout the network without signal degradation associated with AP placement, blockages, shadows and with minimal roaming.
• Channel Layering - Initially, a Coverage Segment requires only one radio channel, allowing other channels to be added for expansion/capacity. Additional channels are activated by adding more radios, scaling the network capacity linearly with the number of channels, without additional RF engineering or reworking the channel plan.
• Application-Specific Traffic Management – Applications are unique and transmit different amounts of data; voice telephony is latency sensitive, periodic, but limited traffic; while, streaming media generates large amounts of traffic. Micro-cellular access points are non-deterministic and have handle multiple types of traffic efficiently, but as the number of clients increases the performance of each access point degrades significantly. Channel Layering allows similar applications to be grouped on a single channel (e.g. voice on one channel, video on a second, etc.) such that an AP only carries similar traffic, enabling increased performance across the network.
• 802.11n and Legacy Fairness - The typical WLAN often involves clients that are capable of a wide range of protocols and data rates – from 802.11b to 802.11g and 802.11a to 802.11n. While newer technologies such as 802.11n enable higher data rates, legacy clients, which require backwards compatibility / coexistence mechanism, always degrade overall performance in a micro-cellular WLAN. With Channel Layering, 802.11n clients can be separated from legacy clients, such that all clients operate at their maximum data rates – enabling 802.11n clients to operate as if they are connected to a Greenfield network.
• Physical Layer Segregation – InnerWireless is the only vendor that can secure RF at the physical layer. While Channel Layering can be applied to applications and network protocols, it can also be applied in broader ways – complete separation of networks. Mission-critical networks (such as a clinical network in a hospital) can be separated from public networks. This separation ensures that the public network cannot degrade the mission-critical network, neither from a performance or security perspective – a key attribute of an ISO/IEC 80001 compliant network.

InnerWireless is committed to making Wi-Fi better – we guarantee coverage and enable significantly better WLAN performance than a discrete micro-cellular network - independently verified by Novarum.  This is why over 90% of InnerWireless customers have embraced L-WLAN and Horizon4G to ensure full support of converged devices.

Today, only 20% of a facility has adequate coverage for smartphones and only 29% of nurses believe that their current Wi-Fi networks provide the coverage and capacity to adequately support operations at the point-of-care.  Clearly, mission-critical wireless is something we are still reaching toward.  But it is achievable.  Mission-critical wireless on a distributed antenna system (DAS) is enabled through broadband wireless, point-of-use coverage, engineered capacity, and 24×7 availability:

• Broadband Wireless – the wireless network should deliver all key wireless services, including 3G and 4G LTE, state of the art 802.11n and legacy 802.11 b/g/a, fire/life/safety and two-way radio, and medical telemetry (WMTS).
• Point-of-use Coverage – the wireless network should be engineered to deliver wireless services everywhere in the facility, not just in traditional hallways, but also in hard-to-cover areas such as the patient bedside, below ground floors, stairwells and elevators – with both coverage and signal strengths guaranteed.
• Engineered Capacity – as the iPad®, smartphones, VoWLAN handsets and other wireless devices become more pervasive, wireless capacity management that optimizes service levels should be a cornerstone capability for both WLAN and smartphones.
• 24/7 Availability – the wireless network should use highly reliable carrier-grade components that is supplemented with around-the-clock monitoring.  Additionally, life-cycle management of wireless devices – from beginning to end – through interoperability and compliance to to ISO/IEC 80001-1 wireless device risk management should be practiced.

UMCSN chose to replace its conventional WLAN system with Wi-Fi delivered over DAS to ensure that the required quality of service (QoS) would be available at every patient bedside across its eight-building, 850,000-square-foot main campus.

The InnerWireless Horizon DAS was designed specifically to meet UMCSN’s requirements for seamless, uninterrupted wireless connectivity across its facilities, with guaranteed coverage and signal strength.

“From day one, the DAS met or exceeded the minimum signal strength guaranteed to us by InnerWireless, and unlike our previous conventional WLAN deployment, we didn’t experience coverage gaps or dropped sessions,” said M.J. Ernie McKinley, CIO of UMCSN. “In fact, CareFusion’s certification team concluded that Wi-Fi delivered over the DAS helped UMCSN achieve the best wireless coverage and most consistent signal strength of any hospital they had certified. They confirmed that the CareFusion Wi-Fi devices could be taken anywhere in our campus without ever losing connectivity.”

In addition to receiving continuous Wi-Fi connectivity for mission- and life-critical applications at the point of care, UMCSN’s decision to deploy its WLAN on the InnerWireless DAS has driven wireless reliability to new heights while dramatically reducing the number of wireless related IT help-desk calls.

“Our new wireless solution has been operational for more than a year and we have received only one wireless related help-desk call,” McKinley said. “We also have realized a 70-percent reduction in IT man-hours spent on wireless infrastructure support, which enables IT resources to focus on creating value by investigating new solutions that can help clinicians care for our patients.”