Years ago when I worked for VitalCom (now a part of General Electric), I designed VHF antenna systems to cover the entire hospital. This was a radical departure from antenna coverage just in "limited" step down areas for telemetry coverage. The idea was to provide "flexible patient monitoring" where the patient was. It also allowed capabilities for moving the patient out of costly ICU beds, allowed real time monitoring throughout transport and helped decrease ER diversions. The only issue was the cost involved with the antenna infrastructure and to think of "not unit" based patient monitoring, but enterprise patient monitoring. Now we have moved from VHF/UHF to WMTS. So in reality it makes good sense to provide WMTS antenna coverage across the entire hospital. The same business issues for improving care are present and this provides a better quality of patient monitoring. However as stated, there are costs of the infrastructure, that is whole house WMTS antenna coverage. It is even more complex and costly if you try to provide WMTS whole house coverage with a DAS, the costs at least go up by a factor of 3. So, the solution is present today. Use 802.11a/b/g "whole house" coverage. Today it just makes sense to provide complete Wi-Fi throughout the entire hospital as you can use this for not only data, but voice (voice over IP), and medical devices. Both Draeger Medical and WelchAllyn have 'traditional telemetry, now the term "patient worn monitoring", but do not use WMTS, but 802.11a/b/g. So when you converge this on the existing Wi-Fi network you save huge costs involved in not having a separate WMTS infrastructure. Enterprise tools are available for the design and management of this Wi-Fi infrastructure, but nothing is available for WMTS. WTMS was often promoted as "safe" spectrum, but in essence it is still RF and drop-out is drop out. A properly designed Wi-Fi network especially with 802.11n coming out works just fine.
