Jupiter Medical Center
Integrated Cisco Secure Mobility and Apple solution improves clinical staff efficiency and patient care.
ABOUT JUPITER MEDICAL CENTER
Operating a world-class hospital in today’s healthcare environment has its fair share of challenges. When it comes to managing challenges, Jupiter Medical Center, which has been among America’s Best Hospitals for three consecutive years while performing in the top 10% of hospitals for patient quality and satisfaction, is among the most respected and preferred healthcare facilities in the nation.
Whether it’s metrics for quality care or best practices for its integrated team of physicians, nurses, technologists, administrative staff and volunteers, Jupiter Medical Center understands that being a high-performance organization is all about “Connecting the Dots.” Their model of integrated teamwork and success is the “cultural” glue that holds their award-winning organization together, empowering the team to enhance workplace satisfaction and positively impacting the patient experience.
For example, the IT team led by Chief Information Officer Tom Crawford, keeps the organization connected with information through a web of healthcare applications and a sophisticated network of data input and communications devices that ensures all the dots are always connected.
Traditionally, these legacy-based healthcare applications are anchored to desktop and terminal endpoints. While this system gets the job done, operational efficiency isn’t its primary strength. It requires clinical teams to be at their stations for data input, which either takes away from their floor time or requires additional staff to key in information.
TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION INTO HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS
Jupiter Medical Center’s CEO, John Couris, known for his focus on innovation in healthcare, understood the value of exploring Secure Mobility as a way to improve the way his clinical teams interacted with mission-critical healthcare applications. From his early days at Massachusetts General Hospital, Couris developed an operations and management style that emphasizes smooth and efficient communication enabled by leading edge technological systems.
“Technological integration into healthcare operations is crucial for an organization like Jupiter Medical Center that’s dedicated to providing its community with world-class care,” says Couris, and with a “Connecting the Dots” culture firmly established, Jupiter Medical Center was an ideal candidate for integrating Secure Mobility into its day-to-day operations.
INNOVATION CHALLENGE
John Couris and the executive team—like many others at Jupiter Medical Center—were fans and frequent users of Apple® devices. Even though Apple as a company had little presence in hospital systems, Jupiter Medical Center could easily envision the obvious efficiencies that an Apple hardware based system could provide for their 1,500-member team that annually handles:
- 10,000+ Admissions
- 7,000+ Surgeries
- 7,300+ Outpatient Surgeries
- 33,000+ ER Visits
- 140,000+ Outpatient Visits
The question was, could the Apple devices front-end the hospital’s core applications?
To find out, a call was placed to Cupertino followed by an on-site visit to Apple headquarters. “It was a very open meeting,” recalls Crawford. Apple was clearly interested in cracking into the healthcare market and their nimble, team-oriented innovation culture meshed well with everyone attending from Jupiter Medical Center.
Within a month of the Cupertino meeting, Director of Technical Services at Jupiter Medical Center, James Lonano, had an exploratory team together from Apple, Wiring.com, Cisco® and Cisco Gold Partner Greyson Technologies. “It took several months around the planning table, wrestling with how best to bring the technology and industry standards together,” said Lonano, “but it was worth every minute and resulted in a cohesive implementation strategy and solution we could rollout in phases over a reasonable time frame.”
“Technological integration into healthcare operations is crucial for an organization like Jupiter Medical Center that’s dedicated to providing its community with world-class care.”
John Couris, CEO
Jupiter Medical Center
GREYSON TECHNOLOGIES: “OUR GO TO PARTNER SINCE DAY ONE”
After months of planning, a long-term project emerged to upgrade the hospital’s legacy-based core applications for Clinical and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and wirelessly front-end the new applications natively with Apple mobile devices, such as iPad® Air 2 and iPhone® 6. The project plan also incorporated an update to the hospital’s voice alert and messaging systems with the same criteria for Apple devices.
The entire project is currently unfolding in sequential upgrades over the course of an ambitious three-year implementation timeline. The overall project plan was Lonano’s responsibility and he was keenly aware of the challenges such an undertaking would entail:
- Multiple partners
- Multiple project phases
- Bridging legacy and new technologies
- No impact to patient care
- Maintaining security
- Adhering to all required guidelines and industry regulations
… and more.
The first two phases focused on adding secure Apple iPad and iPhone connections to Jupiter Medical Center’s legacy-based core applications and updating the hospital’s voice alert and messaging systems. The wireless Apple connectivity completed in these early phases needed to be done with a seamless migration path to the new Clinical and EMR applications once they were on-boarded in a later phase of the project.
“Greyson has been our go-to IT partner since day one,” says Lonano. “Their staff is an extension of our staff. They know our environment inside out. They rolled up their sleeves with everyone else and were central to making our vision a reality.”
Working with Lonano’s technical services team, Greyson carefully analyzed the hospital’s mobility environment, which was deemed to be inadequate for consistently supporting the bevy of devices already on the network, let alone the Apple devices being added.
A sampling of technical issues included:
- Mobility Standards: Comprised of Cisco 2602i and 2702i access points, the network did not universally support the latest 802.11a/n/ac Mobility standards necessary for optimum connectivity and high-speed data transport.
- Low Density: Where the network could support the latest mobility standards, it was relatively low density, which would limit connectivity and bandwidth availability to the Apple devices.
- Channel Interference: Spectralink 8941 Wi-Fi phones were operating at 100mW on the network, more than double the power of the Apple devices, so care would need to be taken to ensure the new, larger Mobility footprint would effectively avoid co-channel interference between Spectralink, Apple and any other devices.
To address these unique requirements, Greyson developed a technology adoption plan for Jupiter Medical Center that included:
- Cisco® 5520 Wireless Controllers
- Cisco® C6800ia Instant Access POE+ Switches
- Cisco® 2700 Series Access Points
- Greyson Professional Services
Working as a team with Apple Professional Services and Wiring.com, Greyson successfully delivered the initial phases of the three-year project plan on time and on budget, “without a technical hitch,” adds a proud Lonano.
“The mobility network is highly optimized,” says Greyson CEO Greg Nordone. “iPhones and iPads are fully integrated into the hospital’s healthcare applications, plus ‘fast lanes’ can be configured and managed to seamlessly prioritize mission-critical communications across the network.”
The Secure Mobility network spans two buildings and eight total floors on the Jupiter Medical Center campus. High-density coverage meant increasing the number of wireless access points on campus by more than 80%, varying on a floor-by-floor basis from 20% to nearly 200%.
RESULTS FOR JUPITER MEDICAL CENTER
The Secure Mobility solution allows Jupiter Medical Center’s clinical team to access data anytime, anywhere and on any device, including Apple iPads and iPhones. Clinical and EMR applications can now be efficiently updated while serving patients in real-time, enabling:
- More staff time with patients,
- More accurate and more complete record keeping, and
- Better and safer outcomes across the board.
The Secure Mobility solution delivered by Greyson enabled:
- Expanded Mobility Network
- 802.11 a/n/ac standards
- High density footprint
- Ultra high capacity bandwidth
- Upgraded Voice, Alert and Messaging Systems
- Secure messaging across all devices
- Apple iPad and iPhone connectivity
- Efficiencies for Elevated Patient Care
- Anytime, anywhere, any device data access and communication between staff
- Real-time mobile data input to Clinical and EMR applications
- More accurate and complete record keeping
Overall, Lonano advises that feedback from team members has been terrific by all accounts, especially when it comes to the vastly improved coverage for mobile devices across the campus.
Jupiter Medical Center is currently staging the next project phase for upgrading the hospital’s legacy-based core applications.
