Considered one of the most modern, high-tech private hospitals in Australasia, St George Private has recently undergone a major upgrade, with two new floors being added and a major change to its patient communication system. The installation of an IP7000 patient communication system replaced the old nurse call system over all levels of the hospital.
The IP7000 provides a major change in nurse call system design for St. George, micallsystems CEO Iain Everington says "As digital convergence becomes commonplace in hospitals, traditional nurse call systems are proving to be less efficient in the control and management of communications and interfacing to building management systems, VoIP and Wi-Fi" he says.
"The new IP technology is patient focused and designed to assist in comfort, efficiency and reliability. The approach utilises modern computer networking techniques in the application of a patient communication system, or nurse call as it once was. There is no limit to the size of the system and multiple sites in various geographic locations can be simply linked," he says.
The merlon design brief was to provide a solution that was flexible, inherently reliable, incorporated 'fail safe', was simple to maintain and built utilising off the shelf non-proprietary key hardware components, to enable ease of maintenance in remote areas.
"In their basic form, current nurse call system designs work in one of two ways: either as a 'tree' at the apex of which the control PC which communicates via RS232, IP, or digital buss, with a ward controller or server" Everington says. "This in turn communicates via a secondary RS485, IP, or digital buss with a number of room controllers, each of which will control eight or so rooms with multiple call points/lights,"he says.
"Alternatively, it can work as a 'loop through' : a PC links to a server which then stars out to various areas. On each 'star' run the cable is looped from call point to call point, to over door light in each room and then again into the next room ad infinitum
These methods of infrastructure, although functional, are often costly to install, difficult to maintain and have several strategic points for potential system failure.
Always having been a proponent of networking solutions, the obvious step for merlon was to fully implement IP, a recognised international standard and ultra reliable networking platform, " Everington says.
The goal we set ourselves was to design our call points, displays, interfaces etc as micro computers (distributed intelligence) each component capable of talking to another via an IP address, across a web or LAN, in this case in healthcare facilities:
To read the full feature article as published in H&A, please visit our News section and click on Networking with nurse call systems.
