A few years ago, actually about five years ago a small group of folks at Draeger to include at that time myself, decided to buck convention and come up the concept that eventually led to OneNet. Imagine that a shared wireless and wired network on an open architecture, shared with healthcare data and voice applications! This did as Tim Gee said in www.medicalconnectivity.com it often takes resources and additional outside third party companies to get this done. But at that time and even now medical device companies do what they do very well, design and manufacture medical devices. They will continue to need to look to third party organizations that are in the network/wireless space day and day out. While it is true you can grow your own organic competence, an outside view always helps. Originally OneNet was deployed with Cisco, now it is signed off with Aruba Networks and now with Trapeze. I commend Draeger to driving this forward in a big way and not backing off. By now collectively they have three WLAN infrastructure vendors approved and they can offer a lot of flexibility to their customers. The challenge for all the medical device companies will be keep up the zillion re-iterations of the WLAN technology model going forward. Perhaps that is why other companies with the exception of Welch Allyn www.welchallyn.com and Draeger are not going down this path quickly. Then again, it is those innovative organizations that tend to change the dynamics of any market segment. Now all the patient monitoring and infusion device companies have some sort of WIFI enabled patient monitor or infusion pump, however how to do this on a shared network is questionable. I do think that it is important to follow on from the white paper that Dr. Baker and I wrote on trying to set the design requirements for a life critical wireless enabled network. As Tim had mentioned, that there must be an easier way? Agree yes. In my opinion the industry (medical device industry), needs to collectively come together to establish as a group what is the criteria for medical device on a wireless network. This would included standarized testing methdologies and the requirements that must be met for software notifications/firmware releases/validation and verifications, risk analysis etc., from the WLAN infrastructure companies. This would put some of the burden on the infrastructure providers and ease testing and provide a quicker roll-out of wireless mobility solutions. To drive costs of healthcare down, improvements in work flow, productivity, and risk need to be addressed, that is a given. Allowing innovative products such as the first WIFI enabled telemetry transmitter (Draeger) www.draeger.com to hit the market are definitely the step in the right direction. Now the question is how can you shorten the life cycle of product development and get innovations out there on a continual basis in the hands of clinicians to improve the delivery of care?
