Boston Children’s Hospital rolls out hybrid 5G network as it plans to unify on Epic
Boston Children’s Hospital recently announced its plans to transition to a unified Epic electronic health record.
Similar to Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health and Pittsburgh-based UPMC, Boston Children’s – both of which currently use Epic and Cerner PowerChart – says it plans to use the migration to a single Epic platform for all its healthcare sites by 2024.
Boston Children’s IT department is “working hard to make this transition as painless as possible,” the hospital said.
In parallel with that project, Boston Children’s is working on another major technology initiative. T-Mobile announced this week that the two organizations are working together to roll out the first hybrid 5G network in a healthcare system.
In a blog post on its website, T-Mobile spoke with Heather Nelson, chief information officer of Boston Children’s, about what hybrid 5G could enable for the care it provides.
“As we explored options to update our electronic health record system, we discovered the need to improve connectivity so that our healthcare professionals can seamlessly access critical patient data,” she says.
The hospital was looking for a network that could scale to “support thousands of devices.” In concrete terms, it wants to expand connectivity beyond the four walls of hospitals to locations of other providers – and to patients’ homes.
“Wi-Fi has worked well, but we are looking to the future,” she said. “We needed connectivity across all campuses and remote practice locations. The hybrid 5G network will make this work possible.”
Nelson said she is already looking at future use cases where the network can “support patient care at home with 5G remote monitoring and AI-based prioritization, prioritizing patient requests in the workflow for faster decision making – sending the right specialist to the right patient” on the right time.”
Mike Miliard is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.