Among the vertical markets that are benefitting from the rapid and widespread growth of technology the healthcare space is clearly a winner. Whether it's imaging or robotic surgery, hospitals the world over are evolving quickly, deploying the latest technological innovations, and offering ever more advanced services to their patients.
Flying under the radar of this technological change, are the changes occurring to the communications infrastructure that underpins these hospitals and allows the practitioners (nurses, doctors, administrators...) to get on with the business of helping people, saving lives, etc... in a more effective, efficient manner.
The so-called digital hospital is no longer a dream.
Case in point, a recent edition of Alcatel-Lucent's Enriching Communications magazine, featured a case study of Annecy Hospital and how the facility is benefitting from Alcatel-Lucent solutions as deployed by NextiraOne.
Annecy Regional Hospital Center (CHRA) is the largest hospital in the Haute-Savoie department in the French Alps, with over 970 beds. Every year, the facility's 2,400 healthcare personnel handles more than 50,000 emergency cases and treats 70,000 patients, requiring 300,000 hospital bed-days.
The plans called for the deployment of next-generation communications infrastructure. The solution had to offer tight security and it had to allow for mobility, allowing information to be available in all areas across the healthcare campus. According to the article
...the project was part of an organizational strategy aimed at setting up an integrated IT system centered on unified patient files and utilizing a network of terminals in patients' rooms."
In the end, Alcatel-Lucent provided a solution for CHRA that involved
...the deployment of an expansive range of communications terminals and infrastructure, including DECT base stations and terminals, IP-voice/multimedia terminals, analog stations, core and distribution network switches, as well as the Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise IP -PBX. The infrastructure connected remote sites over secure links to deliver unified messaging and Mobicall alert management.
To learn more about how Annecy Regional Hospital Center was able to leverage the next-generation communication solutions offered by Alcatel-Lucent, read the entire case study.
