Wireless VoIP and unified communications are supposed to help facilitate better patient care in hospitals and home care but the deployment of these technologies has been stymied by a fragmented approach that can interfere with care, a new study from Spyglass Consulting Group said.

The firm, which is focused on healthcare IT, concluded that healthcare companies need to take an enterprise-wide approach to wireless equipment and mobile devices and involve nurses early on in the planning stages. Concerns about cost of deployments often results in deployments that are limited to certain hospital departments. As such, hospital nurses say about 71 percent of the wireless networks they deal with are poorly designed with coverage problems, interference and overloaded access points.

These results come from 100 in-depth interviews with nurses in home health and acute care facilities. Spyglass covered topics including existing workflow problems and inefficiencies in patient communication and other staff, how mobile devices are being used and the barriers to more widespread adoption of technologies.

For more:
- see this Network World article

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