AKRON, Ohio — Summit Data Communications Inc. gives wireless medical equipment like electrocardiographs and infusion pumps the ability to walk and talk at the same time.
Summit Datacom makes the radio modules that enable wireless medical equipment to communicate with computers in hospitals and other treatment facilities so they can do their jobs while moving around.
Mobility is a key characteristic of the latest generation of medical technology. Burgeoning demands on wireless bandwidths and the challenges of staying connected in health care institutions are making Summit’s technology a must-have for medical equipment makers and computer network providers.
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The market for small and large “rugged mobile computers” in health care segments is expected to grow more than 16 percent a year through 2013, according to VDC Research, the technology market research and strategy firm in Natick, Mass.
The primary applications for the rugged computers in health care — for which Summit Datacom’s radio technologies appear to be well-suited — are in patient records management, according to VDC Research. Other areas of application are pharmacy and inventory management, and patient tracking.
Summit Datacom got its start in 2006 by making radios for equipment used in challenging environments like industrial warehouses where steel shelving, stacks of inventory and the speed of vehicles often interfered with wireless signals.
A Summit radio would typically be installed in a portable computer “mounted on a fork lift truck which is blasting down an aisle at 30-miles-per-hour,” said Ron Seide, a co-founder and president of the Akron technology company. “You have metal shelves on one side. You have metal shelves with [stacks of wood] on the other side. And that changes on a day-to-day basis.”
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No matter how the environment changed, however, the portable computer was expected to reliably communicate inventory and other information to the warehouser’s computer system. That information enabled workers to receive, track, assemble and bill customers for items they shipped.
Hospital buildings also present a challenging environment for wireless signals. “You’ve got lots of people moving around,” said Chris Bolinger, another Summit co-founder and the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. Human beings comprise mostly water, which absorbs radio signals.
“You’ve got some walls that are lead-lined that block the signal. You’ve got some metal,” Bolinger said. “So if you’re transporting a patient, if you’ve got a patient monitoring system or an infusion pump or something else that needs to stay connected as you move around, it can be very challenging.”
Wireless systems in hospitals also must be robust. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates the use of medical devices as well as the wireless networks to which they are connected, Bolinger said. The wireless systems also must be secure — they communicate sensitive medical information to computer networks that warehouse the private financial and identification information of patients.
Initially, medical equipment was connected to hospital computers by wired networks, Bolinger said. Hospitals that went wireless did so mostly through private networks sold by the same companies that sold the medical equipment. Hospitals ended up with several wireless networks that competed with each other for bandwidth. The private networks “become mutual interferers,” Seide said. “And so the whole system … begins to collapse. And that’s what we’re seeing now.”
Enter wireless networks that work with any manufacturer’s medical equipment, enabling hospitals to have a single network instead of several, Seide said. The wireless industry is about a week away from agreeing on a new operating standard known as 802.11n, which has the potential to deliver up to five times as much information with twice the range of the current standard, said Chris Kozup, senior manager of Mobility Solutions at network company Cisco Systems.
Summit Data works with Cisco under its program to license reference designs that enable Summit’s radios to work seamlessly with Cisco’s wireless networks, Kozup said. Summit Data and Cisco also have a connection that goes back to the birth of wireless technology.
Cisco bought a Richfield, Ohio, company called Aironet in 2000. Aironet, a developer high-speed wireless LAN products, was a spin-off of the former Telxon Corp., the Fairlawn, Ohio, company that was one of the inventors of portable wireless computing systems for businesses. All of Summit Data’s founders came from Aironet or Cisco, Seide said.
An increasing number of “endpoints” — from diagnostic tools to patient monitoring and tracking systems — are seeking connections with wireless networks in hospitals, Kozup said. Why? “Health care is a big consumer of mobility. So they’ve been an early adopter, as it relates to mobility,” he said.
Increasing productivity also has been an economic driver for hospitals, said Kevin Geary, global product manager for PageWriter Cardiographs at Philips Healthcare. As a result, hospitals are investing in health information technology to improve their work flow and treat more patients with the same technologies.
The Philips business unit buys Summit Data radios for its PageWriter cardiographs — portable electrocardiogram machines that show the electrical activity of the heart. “Summit allows us to communicate from the medical device to the hospital information system from anywhere in the hospital in a secure manner,” Geary said.
