VA plans to provide wireless Internet access to patients in hospitals

The Veterans Affairs Department plans to install wireless networks at health care facilities nationwide so patients and their families would have Internet access, top officials said on Thursday.

The project would be a massive undertaking to deploy the service throughout VA's 153 hospitals, 134 nursing homes and 50 residential rehabilitation facilities across the country. But patients have asked the department provide Internet service in its health care facilities and officials said they view the requests as part of their service to the veteran community.

Veterans and their families would be able to use the networks for communications, e-mail and therapeutic activities, said Gail Graham, deputy chief officer for Health Information Management at the Veterans Health Administration during the hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. She emphasized that any network VA installs must run separately from Wi-Fi networks already in place in hospitals that support medical operations.

Roger Baker, chief information officer at VA, said in an interview with Nextgov on Thursday that a Wi-Fi network for patients and hospital visitors must operate with an air gap between it and medical networks. If the department installs patient Wi-Fi networks, they cannot compromise the security or data capacity of medical networks used to support bar code medication administration, among other things. A patient Wi-Fi network also cannot interfere with spectrum the medical staff uses, he said.

VA plans to consider using broadband cellular wireless as an alternative to Wi-Fi to support the patient network. In addition, VA does not want to maintain the network, because it doesn't want to be put in the position of banning patients from certain websites, a practice it would likely be asked to do if it ran the system, Baker said.

VA plans to ask the technology industry to propose business models for the outsourced network, including supporting the network through advertising or asking patients to pay for access. The latter alternative most likely will be hard to sell to veterans, Baker acknowledged. He anticipated VA will put out a request for the network within the next six months.

Health care facilities present a wireless challenge, because they typically have thick, solid walls that make it hard for signals to penetrate and medical devices in the buildings create interference, said David Callisch, vice president of marketing for Ruckus Wireless in Sunnyvale, Calif., which has developed Wi-Fi systems for large organizations such as hospitals.

Craig Mathias, wireless analyst at Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., said depending on its size, VA might have to install as many as 200 Wi-Fi access points in each facility, which would place the total cost of a national wireless patient network in the multimillion-dollar range.