Healthcare white papers

Today's caregivers work in environments ranging from the patient bedside to nurse's stations, administrative offices, doctor's offices, and other locations both inside and outside of the hospital building. Traditionally, physicians and caregivers have had to share workstations or visit the nurse's station to view patient information. Writing notes and traveling to a orkstation to input data wastes time, delays care, and can increase the risk of error associated with data entry errors. To improve efficiency and patient care, healthcare facilities are implementing mobile applications that can deliver access o critical information anywhere.

Dynamic communications solutions that enable the real-time flow of information and knowledge in clinical and administrative workflows can dramatically reduce the time between a patient event and its outcome. When this time is reduced, patients receive higher quality care, outcomes are improved, clinicians are more satisfied and operations are more efficient.

The Western Australian Centre of Excellence in Comparative Genomics (CCG) represents a unique approach to research in Comparative Genomics, drawing together biomedical and agricultural research and development, bioinformatics activities and expertise in comparative genomics. At the heart of the Centre is the Bioinformatics Research Laboratory (BRL). Comparing the unique genetic information, or genome, of living organisms encoded in their DNA between individuals within and across species, requires cutting-edge computational tools, and this is provided by a dedicated high performance computing capability, the iVEC Informatics Facility.

The Wits University Donald Gordon Medical Centre (WDGMC) in South Africa provides sub-specialist training for trainee doctors, ranging from transplant surgery to oncology. To ensure that the highest calibre of doctors are attracted to practice at WDGMC, it offers top-quality facilities. To bolster its efforts in this area, it wanted to install a wireless network. Intel was asked to implement a wireless network that could be used by physicians during their daily routines.

Small medical practices commonly struggle to complete labour-intensive administrative tasks while providing personal care to patients. Dr Jayakar and Associates realised that doctors and staff members were spending the majority of their time on telephone calls and messages. The practice wanted to improve communications productivity, but was concerned about maintaining a personalised office atmosphere, and so looked into Unified communications.

Medical imaging and diagnostic equipment (MIDE) is increasingly being networked to Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Hospital Information Systems (HIS), and getting connected to the hospital intranet as well as the internet. Failing to implement the necessary Network-Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) can result in unexpected downtime, and safety and compliance issues, which translates into lost revenue and exposure to expensive litigations, negatively affecting the bottom line.

King Fahad Medical City is a government-funded healthcare facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In addition to providing healthcare services to the local community, it is a model for healthcare in the rest of the country. Consisting of four hospitals and four medical centres, it is the largest health facility in the Middle East, built at a cost of over $600m.