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May 12, 2007
A Place With No Love For Cell Phones
Mobile freaks need to take a trip down to the hospital and watch how fast they'd get dirty looks from the staff in whipping out their cell phones.
A large hospital I wandered through this week had jumbled zones of "No cell phones allowed," "No cell phones within 3 feet of the monitoring equipment," to 4 and 5 bar Sprint reception in the basement cafeteria.
A couple of the wings had the wireless 2.4 GHz SpectraLink VoIP system installed, but there were a few "no go" zones for that equipment as well.
In this environment, the hard-wired phone becomes a necessity, as well as a way to quickly update directories for patients moved from wing to wing. The phones also serve as "punch card" devices for maintenance tasks -- dial a central number, then punch in a code to indicate task completion.
Finding patients on the move from rooms to labs to post-op to rooms can be a challenge for visitors. An ideal solution would be an RFID tag embedded into a patient's wristband and readers stationed around the building to note movement from zone to zone... but there's the bugaboo of RF interference mucking with the equipment again.
It can't be a big problem for hospital management because they always manage to send you the bill, regardless of the outcome.
Posted by dmohney at May 12, 2007 10:34 AM