Tennessee health care system to install Johnson Controls’ wireless tech

MILWAUKEE — The Mountain States Health Alliance, a regional health care system in northeast Tennessee, has signed an agreement with the Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, Inc., for system-wide installation of a wireless distribution technology.

The InnerWireless System will be installed throughout the health care system, including its nine hospitals. This infrastructure provides wireless coverage for a variety of voice and data services.

Mountain States Health Alliance plans to use the system to support an electronic clinical documentation system that will allow medical orders, notes, prescriptions, and medication changes to be entered into a patient's medical record at the bedside. Handheld devices such as PDAs and tablet PCs can then display the information.

Installation of the $2.4 million system will begin at the Johnson City Medical Center in Johnson City, Tennessee, this fall and will be implemented throughout the system over the next 13 months. At Johnson City Medical Center, the wireless system will be installed in the intensive-care unit to complement the articulating arm service columns within each room. These columns will hold all patient monitoring equipment and data connections so that a patient's bed can be moved around the room for treatments, testing or family interaction.

The system is also configured to easily support future applications, including wireless LAN, paging, voice-over IP telephone and energy management.

"We explored several types of initiatives; using a traditional system would have required that we install several wireless infrastructures," said Richard Eshbach, Mountain States Health Alliance's CIO. "With the InnerWireless System we could install one infrastructure that gives us universal coverage and allows us to easily modify and expand without intrusive changes."