subject: Licensed Wireless Services Give Vista Primary Care Nationwide Reach [print this page] Vista Primary Care aims to bring its 21st-century diagnostic and preventive health services to people across Ireland, and it's relying on a licensed wireless network to help fulfil its vision.
In Ireland, the future of healthcare probably looks a lot like Vista Primary Care. Kildare-based Vista is Ireland's first primary-care campus, located just meters from Naas General Hospital. Its chief tenant is K-Doc, a group of general practitioners serving more than 240,000 patients. The EUR25 million centre boasts the kind of scanning and diagnostic equipment which was previously only available in a hospital setting, and which includes one of the world's few 4D CT scanners.
Vista offers ophthalmology, orthopaedic, pharmacy and medical imaging services, including diagnostic services like general X-ray, ultrasound, MRI and CT. Darragh Kettle, Commercial Manager for Vista, is emphatic about the importance of medical imaging to the venture.
"Medical imaging is a principal component of the whole project," Darragh said. "But it's also the highest risk. A key to our success is our ability to get images to any point in the country, and that was going to be difficult using traditional broadband." Diagnostic imagery produced by Vista is analysed by radiologists and other specialists who then produce reports, including selected images, which can be viewed by the referring physicians or hospitals over a secure web interface. The radiologists' report "packages" are not bandwidth intensive, but the original diagnostic images are -- a single 4D scan may contain 8,000 images totalling 14GB. If the radiologists viewing the original images are not based at Vista, all files need to be transmitted to them, wherever they may be in Ireland.
This is the heavy-duty telecommunications challenge Vista brought to the market. The solution was a high-bandwidth, licensed wireless network.
High-performance medical imaging demands high bandwidth After considering fibre and other fixed line options, Darragh said Vista quickly opted for a licensed wireless network delivered as a managed service by AirSpeed Telecom.
Licensed wireless networks use microwave radio technology to deliver highly secure, reliable connectivity at extremely high bandwidth. In Ireland, this means connectivity can be delivered anywhere in the country, including rural regions not currently served by broadband or connected by fibre.
Darragh notes that although Vista looked at fixed line and fibre, it quickly stopped exploring avenues other than licensed wireless because of the technology's obvious good fit with Vista's needs. The licensed wireless network not only lets Vista reach any hospital within the M50 without a cable and without relying on any other third-party technology or provider, it also empowers the organisation to move large amounts of data to virtually any location across Ireland.
A dedicated service delivers for Vista:
* Rapid rollout: Following the first consultation, the Vista network was brought live within 7 days with a 10Mbps link scalable to 155Mbps. This is uncontended symmetrical bandwidth from the Naas campus, via a high site on Kippure Mountain, direct to AirSpeed's centre in Citywest.
* Proactive, managed service: The managed service model allows Vista to perform its work with confidence: constant monitoring of the network means that any issues can be spotted and addressed quickly, before Vista ever feels any impact. "We've not had one minute of downtime," Darragh notes.
* Fast scalability, nationwide reach: The rapidly deployable and scalable licensed wireless network infrastructure offers important flexibility as Vista grows its business and requires links to more clinicians and hospitals across Ireland.
Darragh says licensed wireless is undoubtedly the right technology for Vista, from both a usability and a security point of view.
"Any network is only as secure as your encryption software and applications -- I think security is less to do with the carrier or the network technology than with the generator and processor of the data," he says. "We're very happy to work with this technology. Also the whole notion of managed and licensed is desirable, because there is a lot of unlicensed, unmanaged wireless out there."
The rapid, hassle-free setup also allowed Vista to move quickly with services that will let it recoup its large investment in leading-edge medical technology.
"Our CT scanner alone (Aquilion ONE by Toshiba) cost EUR2.30 million and we would never be able to maximise that technology without licensed wireless, because other available technologies can't deal with those file sizes," Darragh says. "We can't afford to drip feed images -- if a patient is critically ill, images have to be transmitted right away. Technically, fibre can do this level of data transmission, but we didn't have fibre here in Naas, the cost of bringing it here was prohibitive, and the time factor was just too long. Licensed wireless is the right technology for what we do."
