A Look Back in Time: Free Internet Access in Hospitals

This note marks the beginning of a new continuing series in which I will look back in time and quote an earlier blog note. I will then comment about how the key ideas covered earlier have changed in the ensuing years.In January, 2006, I posted a note about the innovative idea at that time of providing free Wi-FI to patients and visitors in a hospital (see:Free Wi-Fi for Patients in Hospitals). Here is a quote from the article:TheRichardson Regional Medical Center now provides free Wi-Fi Internet access to patients and visitors throughout the hospital.What started as a WLAN to support paperless charting became a broader deployment. Today, the entire hospital is on a Wi-Fi system. The system includes waiting rooms, patient rooms and associated medical office buildings. Access is also available to clinical personnel and for business functions. The clinical and business operations are completely separate from patient access so that no one can tap into the hospital's confidential records, [CIO Ronald] Franquiz said."We definitely have total control to make sure that our business network and hospital network are not affected at all."Richardson Medical Center was far ahead of its time by offering Wi-Fi to visitors and patients in 2006 in that Wi-Fi had only been invented in 1997 (see:The History of WiFi). Normally, hospitals tend to be relatively late adopters of information technology. Many of the users of this service in 2006 were probably using labtop computers; few...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Healthcare Business Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Quality of Care Source Type: blogs