ORIGINAL PAPER Implementation Issues for Mobile-Wireless Infrastructure and Mobile Health Care Computing Devices for a Hospital Ward Setting Liza Heslop & Stephen Weeding & Linda Dawson & Julie Fisher & Andrew Howard Received: 17 February 2006 / Accepted: 2 February 2009 / Published online: 11 March 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract mWard is a project whose purpose is to enhance existing clinical and administrative decision support and to consider mobile computers, connected via wireless net- work, for bringing clinical information to the point of care. The mWard project allowed a limited number of users to test and evaluate a selected range of mobile-wireless infrastructure and mobile health care computing devices at the neuroscience ward at Southern Health’s Monash Medical Centre, Victoria, Australia. Before the project commenced, the ward had two PC’ s which were used as terminals by all ward-based staff and numerous multi- disciplinary staff who visited the ward each day. The first stage of the research, outlined in this paper, evaluates a selected range of mobile-wireless infrastructure. Keywords Healthcare . Mobile-wireless . Communications . Device . Infrastructure Introduction mWard project The hospital IT environment is often typically a legacy system that provides access to patient management infor- mation and clinical results and is based on infrastructure such as desktop computers and wired networks, and legacy patient-record software. Legacy systems are large and difficult to modify and resist modification and evolution to meet new and constantly changing business requirements [1]. Many hospitals are locked into a cycle of dependence on legacy systems because limited funds often curtail the investment needed for comprehensive system design and integration. The health care industry, too, is unlikely to develop and deploy a large scale, national authentication infrastructure. Still, and there is some merit in leveraging existing hardware, software, and networks [2]. Some work has been reported on system integration for multi-platform medical computer systems [3]. Jasemian and Arendt- Nielsen [4] report on the design of wireless systems and explore factors to be considered when evaluating different technologies for application in a telemedicine system. Our research was based at Southern Health, a public health service organization located in Melbourne Victoria, Australia. Southern Health provides services for more than 750,000 people, from children to adults, in Melbourne's south east. The research is based on the premise that the work of enhancing decision support for ward-based clinicians at the bedside somewhat relies on the use of mobile healthcare computing devices in a legacy environ- ment to support clinicians with real-time access to network, communication and computer resources independent of location. Mobile healthcare computing devices (MHCDs) is a technical term defined by Lin and Vassar [5] as all mobile and handheld computing devices used in healthcare. The aims of this paper are as follows: & to describe a typical hospital wireless LAN infrastructure & to describe the configuration of the mobile-wireless infrastructure and devices used in mWard’ s test LAN J Med Syst (2010) 34:509–518 DOI 10.1007/s10916-009-9264-y L. Heslop Faculty of Health, Engineering and Science, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia S. Weeding (*) : L. Dawson : J. Fisher Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield, Victoria, Australia e-mail: stephen.weeding@infotech.monash.edu.au A. Howard NEC Australia Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia