Woodstock Hospital Becomes One of Canada’s Advanced Digital Hospitals

Cisco announced Woodstock Hospital (WH) of Canada has chosen a Cisco Medical-Grade Network for its facility, providing a highly resilient, innovative and economical solution to improving health services and advancing patient care.

The new Woodstock Hospital opened for occupancy on November 20, and continues to fulfill its mandate to provide patients and staff with a high-quality healing environment. Utilizing the Cisco network, WH will also deliver the latest technology for patient care and communications. The Cisco Medical-Grade Network infrastructure will facilitate and integrate diverse business and clinical communications between patients, administrators and partners in a highly secure environment.

The medical-grade network, which utilizes 802.11n wireless technology, is designed to provide bandwidth-intensive and multimedia rich applications and information such as medical imaging, to medical staff throughout the facility, regardless of location and including patient bedside. The hospital will benefit from multiple wired and wireless services across one Internet Protocol (IP) network supporting data, voice and video for the fast and easy exchange of information.

Project Highlights:
• Woodstock Hospital’s advanced IP network is the result of the careful collaboration between Cisco and FlexITy Solutions, a Cisco Gold Certified and Master Unified Communications Specialized Partner. Once FlexITy won the network and unified communications business, EllisDon and FlexITy worked very closely to optimize the design and implementation of the network, communications systems and integration of third-party applications.
• The Cisco Unified Communications solution includes approximately 1,000 IP phones, made up predominantly of Cisco Unified IP Phones 7975G and 155 Cisco Unified Wireless IP Phones 7925G. Approximately 165 IP phones are located in patient rooms and will provide telephony and entertainment services. Hospital staff will benefit from Cisco Unified Communications features such as single-number reach, allowing hospital staff to receive calls on any IP phone or wireless device.
• The Cisco wireless network will also support third-party applications to enhance staff collaboration, such as Nurse Call and EXTENSION Mobile, an application that allows physicians, nurses and other clinical staff members to stay connected to each other and to patients from any location, using any wireless device.
• Wireless capabilities will also support real-time Location-Based Services with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking to locate hospital assets such as biomedical equipment and assist in the safety and way finding of patients and staff.
• Additionally, the network will support several patient monitoring systems including Spacelabs and Primex (temperature monitoring), operations systems including ISIS Pro (for bed management), and equipment sterilization.
• The network core incorporates Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches and Virtual Switching System 1140, firewall and packet inspection modules and Cisco Aironet® 1142 wireless access points. In the data centre, redundant Cisco Nexus® 5000 Series Switches feed Cisco Nexus 2000 fabric extenders to simplify the data centre architecture and operations.