A network fit for medicine

Relocating to a new facility in Parkville, adjacent to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, is the new $250 million Royal Women’s Hospital.

Providing world-class health services to women and newborn babies, the relocation to a new facility presented the hospital with an opportunity to upgrade to a ‘medical-grade’ converged network infrastructure and Unified Communications solution.

As part of the Royal Women’s Health Partnership (RWHP) consortium, Baulderstone Hornibrook was responsible for building and Dimension Data competed in an open tender for the ICT services component of the construction.

As the specialist IT services and solutions provider to put the all-new IT infrastructure project into place at the Women’s, Dimension Data began work on the project in autumn 2007. The network roll-out came to fruition for the opening of the new hospital at the end of June 2008, with the $2.4 million project based on Cisco network and Unified Communications solutions.

Converged Cisco network

Under the contract, Dimension Data provided the Women’s with the technology, installation and operational support services for a local area network (LAN) and wireless LAN built end-to-end with Cisco equipment, as well as a Cisco IP telephony system.

As with all hospitals nowadays, a robust, ‘medical-grade’ connectivity solution, allowing high bandwidth and room for substantial growth and flexibility, was in strong demand, said Sven Brook, solution architect for the company.

“An IP telephony system for 1000 users was also required, along with the infrastructure able to handle it,” he said. “They needed a fast and very flexible network that could accommodate wireless telephony on the same infrastructure.”

Consisting of predominantly 7911G and 7941G Cisco Unified IP phone models, these interfaced with the DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) wireless system used by hospital personnel on site.

Challenges afoot

Brook said that because the telephony sits on the data network, this created a challenge in having to achieve the voice quality required within a hospital-grade system.

As a result, Brook said Dimension Data designed the data network specifically to accommodate the demands of the appropriate voice system.

He emphasised the Women’s high need for fast information which can be accessed 24/7 to cater for round-the-clock patient care.

The solution provider was able to accomplish this, said Brook, with the new DECT wireless phones that staff now carry around with them remotely, keeping them connected, regardless of their physical location on the hospital site.

He also refers to the physical cabling of the Women’s network that was implemented, whereby the company was in the position of being able to take advantage of redundant fibreoptic paths for the purposes of high availability – a critical aspect of the hospital’s requirements. “This means that data has multiple paths available on the network, thereby eliminating single points of failure and maintaining very high up-time,” said Brook.

Also implemented were Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series modular high performance core switches, and Cisco Catalyst 3750-E Series high performance edge switches.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager Version 6.0 (formerly Cisco Unified CallManager 6.0), the call processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications System, integrating wired, wireless and dual mode mobile IP devices, were used to create a secure solution for the entire hospital, whenever and wherever it is required.
Considerations for success

In most networks that leverage the concept of Unified Communications, it is inevitable that disparate technologies, vendors and skills sets must collaborate.

Brook said the onus was on Dimension Data to collaborate with other project partners to understand the technical capability of each solution, and design and configure the best interoperable capability.

“We achieved this through a combination of our engineers with broad skills sets and the ability to transfer knowledge of technical requirements to other skills sets,” he said.

In preparation for the installation, several considerations needed to be taken into account, said David Quist, health account manager for Dimension Data. “In order to get the best success from the project planning, it was important to work in close liaison with the building contractors of the new hospital site.”

Construction firm Baulderstone Hornibrook was responsible for building the new Women’s premises and Quist said that close communication with the building consultants for the project was essential.

“As you can imagine, working in a totally new environment, safety and security issues come to the fore – especially when communications during buildings works are less than optimal!”

Working with others

The project involved various relationships with other vendors whose technologies needed to be integrated with Dimension Data’s converged network infrastructure at the hospital.

One of these relationships entailed providing connections into the hospital’s telephone system from its Emergency Paging system (EWIS), in order to allow paging messages to be sent to the hospital’s overhead paging system.

To this end, close communications with companies such as Rauland were required, said Quist. An Australian company which develops, supplies and implements patient care systems, Rauland supplied the hospital’s radio paging system interface which allows users to send pages to users of mobile radio pagers.

Other technologies that needed to be integrated with concerned the hospital’s security doors which have ‘push-to-call’ devices fitted and which are secured after hours. These devices allow calls to be made from the door with a single action to a particular phone extension.

Overall, Quist points out that any project taking place within a greenfield environment is typically challenging – and this was no exception. “For example, just moving things about with the use of one single goods lift during the pre-production phase presented issues, but we were fortunately able to work around them.”

Anthony Callanan, solution architect, said: “We found with there being a fair lag of time between the initial project start and everything going live, as with many organisations, outlooks change. People and processes are all subject to change and this was another compelling reason why the solution needed to be very flexible. Having to accommodate the new desires of new departments can become common. We wanted to be receptive to this aspect.”

Illustrating an example of this, Callanan said that the dual mode mobile handsets were not introduced until the roll-out of the network during early 2008, following their release by Nokia and the hospital’s subsequent decision to replace some of the wireless handsets that had been planned.

Training requirements

More than 1000 Royal Women’s Hospital staff needed to be trained on the new technologies and Dimension Data was instrumental in providing this. Six sessions of approximately 40 minutes each over two weeks were offered to staff, teaching them primarily about the new telephony system.

There were also specific sessions for staff such as receptionists and which were provided by trainers during the first two weeks. For the following two months, a program of follow-up service and ‘reminders’ was also in effect, said Quist.

Early benefits

Delivering information reliably, flexibly and quickly to doctors and nurses has been the major benefit of the Women’s converged network so far, said Callanan. “The 10 gigabite per second network which the hospital has deployed will act as the comprehensive communications platform for the hospital to improve patient care and staff productivity.”

However due to the way the system has been designed and implemented, it has the ability to support other emerging technologies and applications.

According to Brook, this includes improved communication with dual-mode phones, contact centres that do not require a dedicated physical presence (ie virtual contact centres) and location awareness solutions such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications. As a way of tagging movements of items or people (ie hospital equipment or doctors), he said RFID could be of specific interest to specialist hospitals.

Callanan also points to doubling the hospital uplink speeds, a virtual switching system and the introduction of digital signage and/or digital media, as a potential outlook for the Women’s technology of the future.