INDUSTRY OBSERVERS say wireless technology could be just what the doctor ordered in terms of freeing up providers' patient-treatment time, reducing medical errors, and, on the payer side of the industry, expediting the retrieval of treatment data. Now, they add, if only more providers and institutions would get on board the trend toward wireless tech, it could very well have a huge impact on quality of care as well as providers' and payers' bottom lines.

Exaveras e-Shephard platform can wirelessly integrate a hospital information system.

"The history of this kind of technology in healthcare goes back five to seven years," says Chris Kent, director of the Technical Services Group of Daou Systems Inc., an IT consulting and services company based in Exton, Pa. "The thrust then was focused on standalone systems for emergency rooms and cardiac-patient monitoring. But these were proprietary-type systems from various different vendors with different band widths-the bottom line being that they were not all that reliable and adoption of the technology was not all that well-received. This changed somewhat with the coming of the federally mandated 802.11 band-width standards, which were applied for all vendors to follow and provided a common ground for all vendors' systems."

"The big push is to leverage these wireless standards to further increase physicians' mobility," Sweeney says. "With these expanded band widths, caregivers who formerly had to go station to station to retrieve or input data now will be able to go outside the walls of their hospital or institution and perform the same tasks. Patient information can be stored on Palm Pilot-type devices, and broader-band cell-phone networks are being adapted to handle larger amounts of data outside the walls of a care facility."

All - IN - ONE ACCESSIn addition, says Sweeney, some vendors are developing devices that will enable users to access and input data, monitor patients, and communicate with colleagues on a single unit, rather than have to use multiple units to accomplish these tasks.

"The momentum for wireless technology has really taken off," says Daou's Kent. "There's much more of a converged network, where formerly it was more scattered. What you're seeing is that these networks are converging into one, rather than there being various networks for various tasks. In the future, it will be virtually one seamless network. Standard cell phones will be able to be adapted to networks that will allow access to data-retrieval as well as phone calls. It's moving toward better communication between hospitals and employees." And a move toward higher quality of care, he adds.

"When you look at a mobile-type structure, what it does is untether the providers, pharmacists, therapists, and so forth," Kent says. "Now they are not bound to a certain area in order to have access to their work flow. The application of the technology thus drives the infrastructure. Today, vendors are providing tablet-like mobile devices whereby they can pull up information as they do their rounds. With the evolution and standardization of wireless local area networks, this will allow more efficient care, which has the potential to improve the quality of patient care. For instance, this ability to immediately draw upon information that can warn a physician about drugs that a certain patient should not have, can dramatically reduce medical errors."

Evan Bontemps, founder, president and CEO of Exavera, a technology-solutions company based in Portsmouth, N.H., breaks down another area of clinical operations that can benefit greatly from wireless applications. Bontemps' company recently debuted a wireless platform, called eShepherd, that uses RFID (radio frequency identification) tags called Vera-T for patient and healthcare worker identification. The tags are read by Exavera's platform, with the information wirelessly fed into the hospital information system.