Perhaps the most obvious benefit is happy customers who will hopefully find less to whinge about if they get free email and internet while waiting for flights.
Typically wireless networks operating for profit in public places charge an exhorbitant amount of money for your 15 minutes -- to the point where people just don’t bother.
"This is going to be fantastic," says frequent traveller and airport veteran Vincent Shultz. "When you go to airports I usually try to get one of Qantas’ free machines and you get to sit down at a sticky keyboard and find you’re locked out from all the things you really want to do," says Shultz, who is a consultant for Technical Business Solutions.
Providing free wireless access at the airport is a ‘really good marketing opportunity’ for Internode, which paid for the wireless installation out of its marketing budget.
Increasing the awareness of Internode as a brand is one benefit, and in future, there is potential to generate revenue from its airport presence. One way is providing services to the various businesses in the airport’s 3400 square metre retail precinct.
"This should ultimately translate into more sales of our internet and communications services," says Lindsay.
For those needing full access to their corporate email and office functionality, Internode will soon offer immediate, online signup.
Lindsay says customers may punch in a credit card number, "or perhaps do something nifty with their mobile phone", but right now it’s all about free, basic web and email access.
Lindsay says Internode could build exactly the same sort of wireless service anywhere in Australia or globally, and is also in negotiations with various food outlets and café chains throughout Australia. "The concept of using a DSLAM rather than a LAN switch to build a network like this is really an interesting concept.
"Think of shopping centres and food courts where there’s probably not a lot of fi bre running through them, so the use of the existing telephone cable to run the services via DSL is a way of saving a lot of money and achieving a much more rapid time to market," he says.
Wireless at St Vincent’s Hospital
St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney is using a wireless instrument tracking system to record how surgical instruments are cleaned and sterilised, and which instrument is used on what patient in an operating theatre.
"Before the present instrument tracking system, we had a DOS program," says Vincent Cox, nursing unit manager of sterilising services and patient care technology at St Vincent’s.
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| Wireless device used to track how surgical instruments are cleaned and sterilised |
It was a manual barcode system called STS -- sterilising tracking system. Aside from the fact it was not going to be supported beyond the year 2000, it was limited in its ability to track the journey of the instrument from cleaning, sterilising, use on a patient in surgery and back to cleaning.
"It has since been upgraded to a more Windows-based program and is [now] called MAQS -- management and quality sterilisation," Cox says.
MAQS has more in-built quality measures and the handheld device can provide prompts to users about the specific cleaning and assembly instructions relevant to a particular surgical instrument.
"You can track everything that’s happened to the set of instruments in the whole sterilisation process," says Chris Wilson, managing director of Precision Medical, the software provider behind MAQS. "Who packed it, who put it in the steriliser and who took it out, and whether it was okay when it came out.
"You can find it if it’s between store locations sitting on a shelf somewhere, and it is also time-and-date stamped so you can see who had it last. You can also scan it to a patient ID, so you can track which patient it was used on and when."
There’s usually one wireless handheld device (from Symbol) for each operating theatre and a few in the sterilising department. It allows staff to be mobile, and once instruments are scanned, data is received or transmitted wirelessly. The handheld device only has to be put back in the cradle to recharge.
Some of the functionality in MAQS was originally designed to meet the requirements of the Department of Health’s AS4187 standard, which is a "sterilising and processing of instruments standard", says Wilson.
"This requires a sterilising department to keep a record of what they put in a steriliser batch or load. So if the sterilising process fails, you know exactly what was in the load and can find the instruments before they get used," he says.
"NSW Health wanted a lot of KPIs [key performance indicators] for the sterilising department in terms of productivity, machine failure, and how many sterilisers were used, for example. It used to take people a few days to write up manual reports," he says.
Now using MAQS, they can just knock out those reports in an hour, producing whatever information the Department requires, he says.
One of the biggest challenges initially, says Cox, was the time it took to set up the initial data entry for the system.
"Every instrument had to be entered on the system, and it took someone about nine months, working three to four days a week to do it."
Once it was set up, there were negligible staff training issues, he says. "It’s a very easy system to use. In half an hour they pick it up," he says.
In any integration of new systems into the existing ones there’s bound to be teething problems, and in this case the new system worked fine until they wanted a second hospital to come on board.
"We’ve had some challenges because of the microwave link between two hospitals. The database is in one hospital and there’s a microwave link to another hospital," Wilson says.
Benefits at St Vincent’s
Patient safety is one obvious benefit of the MAQS system. If you have not scanned a surgical instrument at a certain point in the sterilising process, the handheld device will alert you that there’s a problem, and you can track where the breakdown occurred, Cox says.
The labels on each instrument or bundle of instruments have a barcode. Each time an instrument is processed, it is given a unique identifier, a unique code, says Wilson. If it is a popular instrument, it could be processed a few times a day, but each time it goes through the sterile process, it gets a different ID, and that is matched to the patient’s ID.
These kinds of safety measures are useful in the litigious medical realm. As Wilson says, "If you can’t show what you’ve done, you have no defence".
Whenever required, MAQS can generate reports for management that show the sterilising department’s productivity, what they’ve charged other departments for sterile supplies, and even sterilising done for GPs’ surgeries outside the hospital.
While there are still a lot of steps in the sterilising process where instruments are scanned, MAQS has helped speed up the process a little, Cox says.
"We’ve gone from a manual system -- where someone had to manually write on every label for every instrument -- to just scanning a barcode," he says. That has to help when some instrument trays contain up to 50 different instruments.
As useful as the wireless instrument tracking system is, Cox says there will always be upgrades and improvements. He would like to see scanning technology imbedded in the sterilisers in future, requiring less staff involvement.
He says it is a shame so many hospitals baulk at adopting wireless instrument tracking systems. "The investment scares them off. Most hospitals don’t see it as a worthwhile investment until there’s been a problem or incident," he says.
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