One hospital, one network
How Cisco partners EllisDon and FlexITy Solutions are helping Woodstock Hospital power its world class healthcare facility
The new Woodstock Hospital recently opened its doors. While the facility will continue to deliver the excellent health services of its predecessor, Cisco Canada has helped ramp these services up a notch, providing new and state-of-the-art collaborative technologies to hospital staff that patients will definitely notice.
A Cisco Medical-Grade Network is the wireless backbone for all the bandwidth-intensive and media-rich applications used throughout the facility. The network infrastructure lets hospital patients and staff use data, voice and video services to exchange sensitive medical information in a highly secure environment.
To get this state-of-the-art network integrated into the hospital, we worked closely with partners EllisDon and FlexITy Solutions.
EllisDon helped ensure the hospital’s network infrastructure was built-in from the start. Stephen Foster, director of ICT services at the construction firm, told me EllisDon was extremely proud to work with Cisco and FlexITy on such a forward-thinking project.
“The speed of change in the healthcare industry is relentless,” he said. “The one IP network approach is central to all of our future-ready buildings and we’re excited to help bring that vision to Woodstock’s new facility.”
To deploy the advanced IP network, we collaborated with FlexITy to ensure all of the hospital’s systems can communicate with each other easily. This next generation network runs everything from the hospital’s various temperate monitoring and bed management systems to the hundreds of Cisco IP phones deployed throughout the facility.
The network also facilitates the use of innovative location-based services. Hospital staff can communicate regardless of their location using third party smart phone apps and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to help locate patients or hospital assets such as biomedical equipment.
“Once again, we had the privilege to work with such a talented team at Woodstock to build this visionary facility,” said Peter Stavropoulous, FlexITy’s chief executive. “With our great partners EllisDon and Cisco, we’re implementing one of the most comprehensive converged network and wireless solutions of its kind supporting Woodstock’s Integrated Medical Systems both today and for years to come.”
When discussing the future of patient-centric services at Woodstock Hospital with FlexITy’s senior project manager Richard Bagshaw, he told me that “there’s so much more the hospital can do in the future” now that the hospital is operating on a unified network. This includes installing wireless bedside entertainment units for patients or implementing Cisco Emergency Responder software, which could allow the hospital to automatically locate and identify 911 emergency calls.
But here’s the best part —we’re helping hospital staff focus on the business of providing high-quality patient care.
Instead of patching together a half dozen networks — all of which need to be managed individually —Woodstock’s unified IP network powers all of the new facility’s wired and wireless services and applications. By centrally managing these services, a doctor will never be constricted by the physical location of their patients or their team of clinical healthcare professionals. Physicians, nurses and other hospital workers will always be connected to each other — and the same goes for their devices.
Without our ecosystem partners EllisDon and FlexITy, this project would never have gotten off the ground. The Woodstock Hospital is now ready to take patient care to a whole new level and we’re excited to have been a part of it!
For more information on Cisco’s healthcare solutions, visit http://www.cisco.com/web/CA/solutions/strategy/healthcare/index.html
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