St. Johannes Hospital Improves Patient Care With Wireless Mobility
By Extreme Networks
St. Johannes Hospital in Troisdorf-Sieglar, Germany, with just over 400 staff members, has more than 182 beds and treats approximately 8,800 inpatients and equally as many outpatients each year. The hospital introduced Gigabit Ethernet at the core and switched fast Ethernet at the edge in 1998 to support its Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) for digital medical imaging. The Hospital Information System (HIS) was looking to create a virtually paperless hospital operations chain. Ideally, the intent was to have all patient information processed and stored digitally and made available to its staff whenever and wherever needed. The latest goal in making the hospital completely digital was to introduce mobile rounds with the use of Wireless Ethernet and laptops at patients' bedsides. This capability would mean the availability of all relevant patient information at each patient's bedside with each bed check. At the same time, the new infrastructure solution would have to support the hospital's mission-critical life-saving applications, all of which are bandwidth-intensive.
