Nortel Buzzboard

A quick note here about a new piece of news from this morning that I found interesting. Today Nortel issued this press release about how Montreal’s Santa Cabrini Hospital is deploying a unified communications solution — one that is supposed to be the first to provide wireless voice, data and patient monitoring services hospital-wide over a single common “clinical-grade” network.

The hospital will also allow staff to use the network for their own personal devices to access clinical applications from the patient’s bedside.While the release talks about all the “official” uses for the network - support for wireless electrocardiogram monitors and other clinical devices along with fixed and mobile IP phones and computers - it was the unofficial use that caught my eye.

The hospital will also allow staff to use their own personal devices on the network to access clinical applications from the patient’s bedside, says Angelo Bodo, the hospital’s manager of Information Systems and Telecommunications. “Once you’ve put technology in people’s hands, you can’t separate them from it. Many of our doctors want to use their own laptops, PDAs and BlackBerry smartphones to access clinical applications from the patient’s bedside. Now we’ve got the infrastructure to do that.”

How’s that for embracing Hyperconnectivity? Instead of putting a big wall around this great new network, the hospital is embracing the inevitable merging of business and personal communications — and likely making their staff more productive by doing it.

This is an amazing feat for any enterprise, much less a hospital where patient confidentiality is many times the #1 contributing factor to odd hospital rules and processes. If a hospital can do this, what excuse does your business have?