Medical

Medical devices, such as EKG monitors and blood pressure monitors, have had serial interfaces for connection to a computer system for a number of years. But with the advent of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) coupled with a need to reduce costs and improve patient monitoring and diagnostic capabilities, there is an increasing need to connect these devices to networks with security. The HIPAA requirements went into effect in 2005. Among other things, HIPAA requires better and more secure health information. By using SILEX device servers, medical devices can securely transmit information directly to the hospital’s central computer system, thereby eliminating errors associated with manually entering test results or copying files. Silex’s biometric fingerprint recognition devices further enhance a hospital’s ability to meet HIPAA privacy requirement by restricting access to computers and other sensitive areas to only those employees with exact fingerprint matches.

By connecting the medical device directly to the network, patient monitoring can be significantly improved because doctors and nurses have immediate access to information from the devices at a central location such as a nursing station. Patients can even be monitored from their homes over the Internet using device server technology. Because medical experts in different cities can directly access the networked medical devices in real time, diagnostic capabilities can be greatly improved.

The increasing requirement for portable medical devices has resulted in the need for wireless networking capabilities. 802.11 wireless device servers enable the exact same networking functionality for medical devices as hardwired devices; the only difference is that no network cabling is required. However, security is even more critical for wireless devices, because wireless technology is inherently more susceptible to intruders because wireless signals propagate (leak) can outside of a building and can therefore be detected by a hacker.

Healthline Clinical Laboratories, Inc. of  Burbank, Calif., needed to increase the turn around time of test results for doctors, they looked to Silex to help in creating an online reporting system that automatically pushes pending and final lab results directly to printers in doctor's offices. SILEX TECHNOLOGY provided its 3100 print server along with research and development resources to create Remote Reporting. With Remote Reporting, Healthline is able to help physicians provide patient care in a speedy and secure way by automating lab results. Using SILEX print servers allows Healthline to provide physicians with near real-time lab results and can provide this to other labs across the country.