Page 1 - Vol0_No06_2018

Publicly available March 12, 2014, revised March 22, 2018.

Building a Reliable Wireless Medical Device

Network

1
By D Hoglund, and V Varga 2
1
Integra Systems, Inc.
2
Global Technology Resources, Inc.

ABSTRACT

How to design and test the most effective and secure wireless medical device connectivity applications that will
provide the true mobility experience that is needed in the 2018 healthcare marketplace. Today’s medical devices
will need to be connected to provide the data to the electronic medical record. This connectivity will be either real
time or on a non real time basis. In either case; the majority of this data transfer will move toward a wireless medium
from a legacy wired connection. The following will discuss best practices for wireless network design based upon
application requirements; but also the protection of any data regarding cybersecurity requirements. The author has
over three decades of medical device knowledge sense but also two decades of wireless and security integration
knowledge sense. The take away is to understand the best practices and how to apply this to product design and the
overall enterprise implementation into the healthcare ecosystem of connected devices.

Keywords – wireless, WLAN, network, acute care, patient monitoring, IEEE802.11, WMTS, telemetry.

INTRoDuCTIoN For the past several decades networked bedside (or

acute care) patient monitoring was confined to propri-
A brief history of the WLAN-enabled medical device. etary, standalone networks for communication from the
bedside monitor to the central station. This was, and is
Historically, patient-wearable monitoring – commonly
even today, often the de-facto standard methodology in
referred to as telemetry – required its own custom de-
the majority of critical care units on a global basis.
signed and proprietary radio system and coaxial cable
infrastructure for unidirectional communication. This infra- Over the past decade, many medical device manu-
structure was built around regulatory domain-controlled facturers have incorporated WLAN in their devices for
technologies, such as Wireless Medical Telemetry Service a multitude of use requirements. This has included the
(WMTS) in the United States. While these designs proved next generation of smart infusion pumps, portable patient
to be reliable, they were often expensive, unique to each monitoring, and within the past five years, telemetry.
manufacturer, and lacked enterprise management and/ Modern enterprise networks, both wired and wireless
or troubleshooting capabilities. These telemetry systems Ethernet systems, have progressed to the point where they,
were generally confined to individual care units within if designed and installed correctly, have proven to be cost
the healthcare facility and utilized several to 100 or more effective and reliable – as demonstrated by hundreds of
dedicated telemetry patient channels. thousands of mission-critical WLAN networks deployed on

J Global Clinical Engineering Special Issue 1: 42-49; 2018 42