Palo Pinto General Hospital Chooses Extricom to Enable Caregiver Mobility

Online, December 3, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Mineral Wells, TX - Palo Pinto General Hospital, a 99-bed County Hospital District healthcare facility, has completed deployment of an Extricom wireless LAN system to support the Hospital's core mission of providing customer-centered, quality healthcare to the residents of Palo Pinto County. The system was implemented to enable Electronic Medical Recordkeeping (EMR) by mobile caregivers, specifically Physician Order Management and Medication Verification applications. It will also support a variety of other applications, including Kronos, PACS, Nihon Koden Telemetry Monitoring, and a VoIP-based Nurse Call system.

The push for conversion from paper-based records to EMR is a major trend in the healthcare field, and wireless LAN systems are an important component of the EMR adoption process. Wireless LANs give doctors and nurses real-time access to medical information directly at the patient bedside or anywhere in the hospital without the need to be tethered to a specific location to use a computer. The result is maximized resource use, and expedited, better informed, and more accurate care decisions that enhance patient outcomes. Palo Pinto General Hospital is well along in its EMR compliance process, and the Extricom deployment will allow it to move to HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6, just short of full compliance, for the entire facility.

The Extricom solution was chosen after a detailed comparison of major wireless vendors. "We looked at Cisco, Aruba, 3Com, Trapeze, which have cell-based architecture, and Extricom, which uses Channel Blanket™ architecture" stated Darrell Polston, Network Administrator for Palo Pinto Hospital. "All of the cell-based solutions had the same issues: holes in wireless coverage and problematic support for wireless mobility, particularly in elevators. Many of our applications are heavily session-based, and loss of the connectivity could really impact productivity and patient care. So Extricom was the best fit for our needs."

"The deployment at Palo Pinto General Hospital is an important benchmark for Extricom as we look to expand our presence in the healthcare market." said Honore Labourdette, Extricom's VP of Sales North America. "We see it as a showcase for how an Extricom solution can provide healthcare enterprises with the kind of highly reliable, future proof network infrastructure needed to ensure that EMR adoption programs achieve maximum value."

What makes the Channel Blanket architecture well suited for the healthcare environment is that it is designed with mobility as a baseline value. An Extricom system utilizes multiple Access Points operating on the same channel to create widespread, contiguous blankets of coverage; and a central Extricom switch that coordinates AP transmissions to ensure that there is no co-channel interference. The result is simpler deployments, resilient wireless coverage and uninterrupted mobility with no handoffs between APs as wireless clients move around. Layering of multiple channel blankets enables service flexibility to support a mix of applications with different QoS requirements, all critical criteria for wireless infrastructure that supports healthcare IT operations.