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Baptist Memorial Health Care
Baptist Memorial Health Care goes wireless to improve patient care and operations
At a Glance
- Increased — Connectivity, mobility, reliability of the wireless infrastructure serving seven Baptist Memorial facilities, enabling clinical staff to monitor, record, and administer care anywhere it’s needed.
- Eliminated — Concerns about whether wireless would work.
- Enhanced — Patient safety and quality patient outcomes.
The challenge: Enable doctors and nurses to record, monitor, and administer care from anywhere at any time
The Baptist Memorial Health Care System in Memphis, Tennessee is an award-winning network dedicated to providing compassionate, high-quality patient care. But its leaders wanted to take patient care to the next level and further enhance how care is delivered at the patient bedside. In order to do so, they would require a solution that would un-tether them from stationary computers and give their medical staff the capability to access critical information at anytime from anywhere, particularly at bedside, as well as to administer care and record what was administered accurately and flawlessly. What was needed was a wireless distribution network that would provide mobility and unquestioned reliability and support connectivity at the point of care.
The solution: A robust, reliable engineered wireless infrastructure
Baptist Memorial engaged Johnson Controls to help design and implement a wireless solution. But before determining the specific nature of that solution, Baptist Memorial did research to better understand how it managed work and patient flow. It also looked at how clinicians practiced medicine as well as recorded and exchanged information while caring for patients. That research underscored the necessity of mobility and reliability in any solution which would affect patient care, particularly at the bedside. Johnson Controls proposed a wireless solution that utilized a distributed antenna system, as opposed to a discrete antenna system. The company made that recommendation because, unlike distributed antenna systems, discrete antenna systems rely on overlapping fields of coverage and are susceptible to signal weakness and dead spots. When it comes to information flow in health care delivery, there can be no dead spots. There must be constant signal availability.
Though the Johnson Controls solution offered such reliability, the company and Baptist Memorial had to address any concerns key stakeholders might have about relying totally on a wireless system and whether there would be any points of failure. They did so to the satisfaction of all interested parties and proceeded with the implementation.
Results and benefits
The newly enhanced wireless infrastructure supports the goals Baptist Memorial had in mind. Doctors and nurses can record care and document it in the system from the patient bedside. They can access and retrieve up-to-date critical information at the point of care. The infrastructure supports voice and data communication from a host of devices – cellular and smart phones, two-way radios, digital pagers, and handheld clinical devices. The redundancy built into the system ensures continuous connectivity and signal availability so that information can be recorded and retrieved, and care administered at anytime from anywhere. Since the medical staff can access information and document care more quickly and easily, they have more time to do what they do best – provide care. In short, the wireless infrastructure solution contributes to what is most important: quality patient outcomes.
In order to provide the best clinical outcomes that we can, we’re looking for access to medical information from anywhere using a variety of devices, and the Johnson Controls wireless system provides that access.
– Keith Scarbrough, Administrative Director of IT, Baptist Memorial Health Care
Learn more
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