GE Enterprise Access Wireless Solution Gains Momentum with Hospitals

GE Healthcare and MobileAccess announced today that more than 10 hospitals in the last quarter have selected GE Enterprise Access as their universal wireless platform for hospitals. The Consumer Health World Conference recently named GE Enterprise Access as the “Best Mobile Technology for Improving Patient Care.” GE and MobileAccess launched this wireless solution in December 2005. Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City are among the latest hospitals to leverage the universal GE Enterprise Access wireless platform to support the mobile caregiver and enhance the patient experience.

GE Enterprise Access combines the strengths of MobileAccess technology and GE’s broad portfolio of wireless clinical products. The solution was designed to meet the rigorous demands of the dynamic healthcare environment and support multiple wireless services over a common infrastructure. With its built-in wireless interference mitigation capabilities and modular architecture, GE Enterprise Access seamlessly adapts to new wireless service requirements, providing reliable wireless coverage throughout hospitals without disrupting operations or interrupting existing services.

Wireless applications and services including Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WMTS), patient monitoring, 802.11 a/b/g with encryption, Voice-over-WLAN, two-way radio, cellular/PCS, Wi-Fi, paging, public safety radio, and fire/safety communications are becoming increasingly vital to doctors, nurses, patients, hospital operations staff and first responders. GE Enterprise Access, in one product, helps to resolve the challenge of hospitals using multiple ad hoc systems and separate parallel networks. Additionally, GE Enterprise Access minimizes the disruption to sensitive hospital environments, a disruption that multiple ad hoc systems can potentially create.

“GE Enterprise Access supports hospitals’ growing focus on the mobile caregiver and enhancing the patient experience,” said David Ataide, general manager of GE Healthcare’s Monitoring Solutions business. “The innovative universal wireless platform creates an environment where information is shared and accessible in real time throughout hospitals. The solution also supports a myriad of wireless technologies and ensures they work together seamlessly with a focus on workflow, caregiver interaction and patient satisfaction.”

To this end, in July 2006, GE and MobileAccess announced the availability of a jointly developed WMTS solution that enables hospitals to operate GE’s ApexPro® CH wireless telemetry patient monitoring directly over GE Enterprise Access.

Some of the hospitals currently using GE Enterprise Access include:

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois: Northwestern Memorial Hospital selected GE Enterprise Access to support the hospital’s ambitious program to utilize technology to continually improve patient care. The solution appealed to Northwestern Memorial because it ensures that doctors, nurses, staff and patients have wireless access to a full range of interpersonal, clinical, and building services throughout the hospital’s expansive 3 million square foot campus. The hospital also selected GE Enterprise Access because it enables the IT staff to offer all the services on a common infrastructure, and the ability to readily add new services and extend coverage throughout its expansive campus.

Already, Northwestern Memorial has completed two of the three planned deployment phases. GE Enterprise Access is deployed in 1.5 million square feet of the Feinberg and Galter Pavilions and delivers pervasive wireless coverage for GE’s ApexPro® CH wireless telemetry and patient monitoring, Wi-Fi-enabled mobile PC carts, wireless VoIP phones and physician/caregiver pager alerts. The solution also supports wireless Internet access for patients and visitors, as well as in-building cellular/PCS and 3G services from all of the major mobile carriers in the metropolitan Chicago area.

Northwestern Memorial continues to build on their GE Enterprise Access deployment with current pilot projects for mobile nurse/caregiver call systems, medical monitoring alerts, and location-based services. The final phase of the deployment will deliver seamless wireless coverage to an additional 500,000 square feet of the Feinberg and Galter Pavilions and the 1 million square foot Prentice Women’s Hospital, scheduled to open in the Fall of 2007.

Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City, Utah: Intermountain Healthcare incorporated GE Enterprise Access into the design plans for its new 1.5 million square foot campus and they plan on making the solution standard for all new buildings in its healthcare system. The solution is currently available in the central lab and the Jon and Karen Huntsman Cancer Center and it will be available throughout nearly all of the remaining buildings, including the Carolyn Barnes Gardner Women’s and Newborn Center, the J.L. Sorenson Heart and Lung Center, and the Roy W. and Elizabeth E. Simmons Trauma & Emergency Center/J.L. Sorenson Patient Tower when they open in October 2007.

Intermountain Healthcare selected GE Enterprise Access for its multi-service capabilities, universal architecture and proven track record in hospitals. The hospital’s IT staff wanted to give caregivers and patients pervasive wireless coverage for services, including Vocera’s 2-way instant communications system, VoIP, Wi-Fi and cellular services from Cingular, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon. The hospital also saw the value of having a single infrastructure capable of supporting additional services, without re-wiring, impacting workspaces or existing services. Lastly, hospital planners agreed that housing intelligent network components and access points (APs) securely in telecommunications closets would improve manageability.

“In today’s hospital, migrating to a wireless infrastructure is more than a ‘nice to have,’ it is becoming the intrinsic ‘need to have’ for both staff and patients,” said David Baird, Intermountain Healthcare’s Urban Central Region Director of Information Systems. “GE Enterprise Access is the smart choice for hospitals looking to enhance the communication fundamental to decision making and patient care. With GE Enterprise Access, we have a wireless infrastructure that readily adapts to our shifting technology requirements, enabling us to adopt cutting-edge wireless services, applications and devices as we need them to improve communication and coordination of care. By delivering real-time access to information across our campus, GE Enterprise Access helps us improve caregiver productivity while reducing travel, testing and waiting times for patients, and operational costs for our organization.”

“MobileAccess and GE are helping hospitals across the country roll out ambitious programs to help improve patient care so that doctors, nurses and staff have better, more secure access to critical patient information,” said Cathy Zatloukal, president and CEO, MobileAccess. “Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Intermountain Medical Center join a growing number of prestigious hospitals that understand the benefits of a single, low-maintenance infrastructure to support all of their wireless needs. With GE Enterprise Access, these hospitals are able to create immediate operational efficiencies while positioning for growth, so they can eventually take advantage of emerging innovations in wireless medicine.”

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare’s broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new “early health” model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com

About MobileAccess Networks

MobileAccess Networks is an enterprise wireless innovator that provides a universal platform for connecting the people and applications that drive business. The MobileAccess Universal Wireless Network is the key to widespread wireless connectivity in hospitals, office buildings, public venues and other large-scale facilities. The company's intelligent, in-building infrastructure delivers business-quality performance, scalability, security and signal reliability to more than 1000 customers, including Fortune 1000 companies such as Lehman Brothers and Hearst Corporation, leading healthcare facilities such as Northwestern Memorial and Clarian Health, as well as many public sector customers such as Aladdin Resort and Casino, ALLTEL Stadium, American University, and the Oakland International Airport. For more information, visit www.mobileaccess.com