Australia’s Mater Health Services, Queensland’s largest not-for-profit hospital group, is making significant strides in achieving its Smart Hospital strategy with a roll-out of an expanded suite of business applications on its Cisco® Medical-Grade Network across its seven ultra-modern hospitals, Cisco Systems announced today.In the third year of its Smart Hospital information and communications technology (ICT) strategic plan roll-out, the Cisco Medical-Grade Network provides Mater Health Services with a communications infrastructure converging voice, video, data and wireless in a single highly secure real-time information system. Mater Health Services chose to implement the Cisco Medical-Grade Network to fundamentally improve health care delivery and clinical outcomes for patients.
The Cisco Medical-Grade Network is also helping Mater Health Services implement a clinical information system to be deployed in the neonatal intensive care unit, which will allow clinicians to track the progress of premature babies from anywhere on the hospital network and remotely via a highly secure Internet connection. Also, with the nurse-call integration solution, nurses can easily reach patients from wherever they are. This solution provides faster response times, more time for staff to spend on primary functions, and a reduction in paging for a quieter, less-disruptive environment. Nurses will have the capability to speak to the patient to better understand his or her needs before going to the patient room. Other solutions are also being designed by Cisco.
“Mater’s Smart Hospital strategy needed to be underpinned by a reliable and pervasive IP delivery platform, ” said Mater Health Services CEO Malcolm Thatcher. “Cisco’s commitment to understanding the unique needs of the health care sector made Cisco and its technology the only plausible choice for Mater. Over the past two years, Mater has rolled out what is now a robust, unifying Cisco network to support our data and communications needs.”
