Wireless In Healthcare
And now for something completely different!
Life has thrown me a curve ball this month, which helps explain my recent absence. Without getting into any gorey details, suffice it to say that my relationship and living situation status has abruptly changed, which is also putting my financial status into an unknown state. Still, happily, life goes on and I’ve been concentrating more on a big project at work and putting my studies on a temporary hold. This project is a huge one, involving a large hospital campus and surveying for a completely new 802.11n wireless deployment which will be VoIP grade. I feel lucky to have been involved with this project early on and to be doing so much of the leg work on it as it’s been a huge learning experience.
Working in IT in Healthcare always presents unique opportunities and challenges and nowhere is this more apparent to me than when it comes to wireless. It seems like every day a new application is found for wifi or RFID and it really does have the power to make a huge impact on the day to day workflow of physicians and nurses. Whether it’s improving communication to staff on a critical care floor, allowing remote assistance in the OR for special surgeries, or even tracking babies and making sure they aren’t taken out of the nursery by the wrong people, or tracking temperatures of refridgerators so that staff don’t have to, wireless is going everywhere.
Unfortunately, just like the wild wild west, this frontier isn’t always understood by those pushing us to explore it. Most people think wireless networks are all just as easy to set up as their network at home, but enterprise wireless networks require very careful planning and a lot of surveying. Then add to that the unique architecture of a hospital campus. Before I worked at a hospital, I thought they were just buildings with some different walls and such. Nope. Hospitals almost grow like organic organisms, with old buildings merging into new ones, the lines between blurred and constant change and construction. Then there are all the building systems in the walls, from lines for oxygen and water, to lead walls to protect an X-ray room that hasn’t been there for 20 years. Then you have hallways that are a constantly changing landscape of beds, carts of food trays, IV poles, and other obstructions. Finally, you have the shiny floors, stainless steel, and glass. Why is all this important? Because it all adds up to an environment that is probably the least suited to clean RF signal propigation! I’ve actually talked to an engineer at another hospital who resorted to bringing in a company that specialized in deploying wireless networks in coal mines to get their wireless network to work.
What this all boils down to is that you have to become intimately familiar with each and every building that you are going to be deploying wireless in. You survey and tweak and survey again, walking each and every square foot you can get into, whether that means putting on scrubs to walk around the Operating Rooms, or dodging your way through a busy Emergency Room. You get to know it all and you design a network tailor made to fit it. Then, when things change, as they will before you even finish, you survey again and adjust with the changes. I’d recommend a good pair of walking shoes and some weekend weight lifting to anyone considering such a career.
What makes it worth it? A network that helps doctors and nurses do their job even better than they already did, which means patients might get taken care of just a bit better because of you…how often does a network engineer get to play hero or pretend to be Dr. House?
Ok, I freely admit I have no idea how Men In Black has anything to do with Microsoft Network Load Balancing and the 
