WRMC Plans New Technology With Move

When Washington Regional Medical Center moves to its new $89 million building on Aug. 27, hospital administrators also will unveil some new technology changes.

Some of the major changes include:

• A $1 million Picture Archival Communication system, which provides digital X-rays that can be placed on compact discs and delivered more efficiently than film;

• A $50,000 “virtual private network” that will allow doctors to view those X-rays on a computer from home while in their pajamas, if they wish; and

• A pneumatic-tube system that will use air pressure to zap a capsule (like those at bank drive-through lanes) through 3,350 linear feet of tubing to 25 different stations throughout the four-story, 350,000-SF hospital.

“Whether it be blood or Scotch tape, it can be put in the tube and get there quickly,” said Becky Magee, vice president and chief information officer at WRMC. Each capsule can hold up to 7 pounds of material.

Some of these changes have been in the works for a couple of months so they could be fully implemented at the new location at North Hills Medical Park. WRMC has been at the corner of College Avenue and North Street since it opened as Washington County Hospital in 1950.

With the move, WRMC will go from being a 190-bed hospital to a 233-bed hospital with all private rooms.

Digital files, X-rays

“We will be the first hospital in Northwest Arkansas to go completely filmless with this new system,” said Beth Mack, a spokesperson for WRMC.

Magee said the new technology will cut down on paperwork dramatically.

“Frequently, doctors can’t make a decision because somebody else has the chart,” Magee said. “Tracking paper in health care is hard …”

“Because it has to go through so many hands,” Mack said, finishing Magee’s sentence for her.

With the new technology, the chart will be available on a computer screen at each patient’s bedside.

For emergency room triage, a similar system will be used with information on patient status displayed on a 51-inch plasma display screen as well as on computer screens in the various patient rooms in that area. “Before, they wrote [the information] on a piece of paper and ran it back to the doctors,” Magee said.

Doctors, who are known for sloppy penmanship, will be able to dictate information and prescriptions into the computer system, and the computer will write the prescriptions.

“This type of technology improves the readability of the record,” Magee said. “The whole idea is to move patients faster … Everything is on the computer.”

Magee said the new hospital also will have “IP telephony,” meaning the telephone system will be running on the computer network.

“Voice and data will run across the same connections,” she said. “We’re the first hospital of our size in the nation going to full IP telephony.”

That means the computers can be used as telephones and the telephones, if necessary, can be used as small, handheld computers.

Magee said “redundancy” has been built in so that if one system goes down, another kicks in to do its job. Like all modern hospitals, WRMC also has generators in case of a power outage.

“We are a self-sustaining little city,” she said.

WRMC gets GigaMAN

Magee said WRMC will be the first business in Arkansas to have a “GigaMAN connection,” which is a product and service of SBC Communications Inc.

GigaMAN refers to bandwidth (Internet and connectivity speeds.) A GigaMAN is slightly slower than a fiber optic backbone, Magee said, but it costs considerably less.

The GigaMAN will cost Washington Regional $5,000 per month and will connect the new hospital with the old building on College Avenue.

According to www.gigaman.com, a GigaMAN is a point-to-point Metropolitan Area Network data transport based on Gigabit Ethernet technology.

“A GigaMAN circuit is a low-cost way of interconnecting two LANs or connecting your LAN to the NACIO Netsource Center for fast, secure access to a wide variety of NACIO Enterprise Services including Managed Servers, automated robotic backup and terabyte-class Storage Area Networks,” according to the Internet site. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

A GigaMAN can transfer data at a gigabit (1 billion bits) per second. That’s more than 650 times faster than a T1 connection and 22 times faster than DS3.

With a GigaMAN connection, WRMC would be able to download every issue of National Geographic magazine ever published in 3.73 hours, Magee said. A fiber optic backbone (which downloads at 1.02 gigabits per second) could do the same job in 3.65 hours.

“In the world of computer technology,” Magee said, “Tyson and Wal-Mart will be jealous.”

Mack said the six-story building on College Avenue that housed Washington Regional will continue to serve the hospital primarily as office and administrative space. WRMC’s wound-care clinic will continue to be located there.