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I am in the third day of attending this event with over 80,000 attendees. It makes HIMSS pale by comparision. One of my most interesting visits was visiting the Hospital Sirio-Libanes in San Paulo. Had a great opportunity to have a personal site visit by the Director of Intensive Care. Totaly state of the art in all respects. More on this later. Bottom line, great show, huge attendance, innovations all the place from technologies that simply you would not see in the United States.
I will leaving this evening for Brazil to atttend HOSPITALAR 2010. This is the largest medical device and healthcare show in Latin and South America. 80,0000 people will be attending and I will the opportunity to speak on wireless in healthcare. Blogs will follow, then undestand this is a huge show in a huge city.
More and more medical devices have become WLAN (802.11a/b/g), but not yet 802.11n enabled. As a part of the validation and verification required for a FDA 510k submittal; these medical device companies are required to conduct rigorous testing processes to ensure that the WLAN enabled medical device will operate as intended. This operation is defined to ensure that the WLAN enabled medical device will operate over an enterprise WLAN network correctly; and that this adheres to the best of practices for enterprise network deployments. These best of practices are essentially how the WLAN enabled device will operate with shared applications over a "discrete" WLAN environment. The testing and approval of this design by either an internal letter to file or a FDA 510k submittal and approva, l ensures that the intended WLAN enabled device will not only operate as intended; but provides the most risk free wireless environment. Thus the medical device company that will offer the WLAN enabled medical device will provide the the end user the design and guidelines that will enable the healthcare client to follow the best of practices pending IEC 800001. Several DAS (Distributed Antenna System), companies have marketed that they are able to provide WLAN enabled medical devices over their shared infrastructure. It will be critically important to understand and have these DAS infrastructure providers obtain the validation and verification criteria (testing); either internal or external and provide this to the regulatory (FDA) submittal if deviation is made from the best of practices i.e. discrete WLAN deployments. The salient question is will the provider of the DAS infrastructure assume the risk if a sentinel event occurs on a non-standard best of practices infrastructure design? Will the infrastructure provider provide the documentation of validation and verification that additionally follows ISO 90001? How will this ensure that the healthcare CIO has the documentation that will help them meet IEC 800001 guidelines pending in 2010 and 2011?
While I did not actually have time to attend, I did have some very interesting meetings with several collegues and companies in the evening hours at the Estancia La Jolla. It is not so much the infrastructure companies that caught my eye, but the applications for mobility, medical device connectivity, and communications. Infrastructure providers have been baked out. It about the right business model that will support 4G and separate from the costly enabled and technically challenged. 802.11n MIMO technical model. 2010 shall be interesting.
Several years ago I met with Neil Deiner of previous Cognio Technology and talked to him about the value proposition of developing a multi-frequency spectrum analyzer beyond what he did for 802.11a/g/g/n. Knew what developed was what the industry wanted and guess what www.cisco.com bought the company!
Healthcare is one of the most RF intensive environments ever and now that www.cisco.comhas decided to take laptop based tool and incorporate this into their enterprise AP(s) it is truly one of the first steps at helping mitigating any RF interference risk. Maybe this becomes a part of the best practices document circulating within the IEC 80001 discussions? Should this also not be expanded to WMTS?
