This was a very busy but good conference. Had a good presentation today with Tom Boston of www.gtri.com on best practices for medical device connectivity. Thanks Tom, you did a great presentation,i.e. our joint presentation. In the afternoon I conducted the second (first in 2009) MDC workshop on DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems). Not hundreds of people attending, but a small group of luminary medical device companies that were very much appreciative of the education and subject matter expertise. All in all it seemed that in this third year that the conference was again well attended. I applaud both Tim and Satish for a job well done in orchestrating this event. My feeling is that is a "min" HIMSS of which if were HIMSS, these topics would have never been discussed. Also, it is an opportunity for serious hard line debate and networking on serious topics...of which in my opinion probably could not have or would not have happened at HIMSS. Finally, it allows an opportunity to have a one to one discussion to figure out the reality from the fog in medical device connectivity. Hence why everyone simply needed to hang out for the entire two days.
In this day of proven standard networking schemas, i.e. 802.11x for both enterprise and medical devices; it was interesting to see that an another WMTS like derivative, or 700MHz frequency was proposed. Not quite realy clear why this is proposed, as it just adds huge costs, when it is realized that we need to simply to reduce costs for healthcare! As John Chambers, CEO John Chambers said in 2005, proprietary networks are dead, as well as my opinon that proprietary "spectrum", is dead. The challenges are that carriers simply have limited spectrum, probably would not want to share the risk, and what would be the increased or additive costs to the medical device? WMTS has proven itself to be a costly endevor over the years, hence why the continual march to incorporate medical devices over the WLAN with proven QoS and security. Cisco Systems, Inc. and Aruba Networks are the two market leaders in the WLAN space and they have demonstrated significant and proven expertise and the ability to incorporate WLAN enabled medical devices into their WLAN ecosystem. Seven proven years of integration. These two companies alone control around 90% of the WLAN space across ALL vertical markets. So with this market dominance (from a WLAN perspective) you would think they would know and have the right deployment model "baked"? Philips Medical Systems introduced in August 2011, the Mx40 of which is extremely similiar or somewhat identical to the Draeger M300 in functionality. Some of the publich domain annoucements seems like a M300 advertisgin. My hats off to Draeger for setting the bar here. However, the real difference is that Drager has OneNet, uses 802.11x enterprise, while the Mx40 of Philips continues to use the existing WMTS (higher frequency of WMTS) infrastructure. It is my opinion that Philips will use WMTS to work out kinks of this new patient worn monitor with their existing customer base. May take a year or so. However, like the rest of the medical device community, they will probably abandon WMTS and move this over to the enteprise LAN and WLAN. Since they are the market leader they have the luxury of doing this. Bottom line is that Draeger and Philips seem to be the movers and shakers in the space. Not quite clear where the strategy of General Electric and Spacelabs are? However, watch out for some up and coming players in patient monitoring that have taken a whole new approach to algorithms, physiological parameters, and networking innovations. They will be appearing on the scene in 2012 and simply will challenge convention in what we consider the traditional "patient monitoring space". More later on this. This is exciting time to be in this space as innovation in terms of wireless technology is happening on a daily basis.