As most conventions this year, it seemed attendance was somewhat down, but overall the show was dominated at the entrance by the traditional companies like Philips, GE Healthcare and Draeger Medical.
Regarding the wireless space, it seemed there was the flurry of RTLS companies. The traditional WFI RTLS players like AeroScout and Ekahau, are battling it out with the likes of Centrak and Awarepoint. It is my feeling that for RTLS to have real business value, it needs to be deployed on a enterprise basis. A lot of RTLS deployments have been limited to only departmental systems. In this space there have been a lot of companies gone "poof". Again, RTLS is not about tracking IV pumps, it is about scalability, granularity, costs, and how will you deliver "real" business value.
Cisco Systems and Arubanetworks were absent, however they usually do not attend www.aami.org, only www.himss.org . In regards to the DAS (Distributed Antenna System), Innerwireless did show up. Mobileaccess by the final copy of the www.aami.org program folder was supposed to attend, but they did not show up. The new kid on the block regarding "smart pumps", was Sigma. www.sigmapumps.com. Now that they have aligned (distribution) with Baxter, it will be interesting to see if and any traction. Question where they are going with the Collegue? In this pump they claim 802.11b, going to 802.11b/g, VPN with no server, but their site shows a server. The IRDA port is used for drug library updates, and apparently to update each pump with an individual wireless profile. This should be done on an enterprise basis, and pushed out without having to touch each and every device.
Welch Allyn www.welchallyn.com did have their new AcuityLink Clinician Notifier.
When I worked for Symbol Technologies there was somewhat of a push back to carry a PDA for single applications. However in the case of Welch Allyn, this is a really cool tool. It is like carrying a central station in the palm of your hand and puts's the power of the previous Emergin platform front and center. While some prior enterprise companies have tried to push out alarms to VoIP phones with snippets of waveforms, what they have failed to realize is that this is now classified as a medical device. For the sub-acute areas where clinicians are having to respond and take of more and more patients this tends to make a lot of sense.
Finally, what seemed to me to be pretty innovative was Masimo RadNet.
This is not because Jim Welch and I go way back, it is because what they have done makes a lot of sense from a wireless and networking platform. That challenge is that rising acuity levels and an aging population requires new patient management strategies on general care floors. This requires continuous monitoring of patient oxygen levels with pulse oximetry and the ability to send clinically and meaningful alarms to the appropriate caregivers. This leads to improved patient safety and a significant reduction of unobserved sentinel events.
The Masimo Rad-87 has embedded at 802.11a/b/g and is fully compliant with WPA2 and 802.11x. Further it follows the same overall strategy as OneNet from Draeger Medical. "Share the WLAN infrastructure". As the sub-acute market is growing more and more hospitals will desire flexible solutions. However it seems that the other two "major" monitoring companies are insisting on "dedicated WLAN infrastructures". The cost of dual "WLAN infrastructures" just does not make sense in today's economic climate. Quite frankly, it never made sense. All you have to do is architect the shared infrastructure, just like you do for voice over IP. Medical devices use extremelly low bandwidth per device. Finally RadNet uses LINUX and Goolge, MYSQL, Open Source. Unique direction to potentially shorten development time, cost, and support considerations.