On December 19, 2008, a group of about 50 people met to to discuss wireless medical devices. The event was organized by Don Witters of the FDA, Elliot Sloane from Villanova (and contributor to HITSP, IHE, ACCE and others), the wireless Czar of Partners Healthcare, Rick Hampton, and ubiquitous industry standards maven, Todd Cooper. The meeting was held in the new nursing school building at Villanova with a live video teleconference connection to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh.

The meeting was billed as a workshop on wireless technology in health care, with an emphasis on what is needed for safe, secure and reliable deployment. (You can download the agenda that was sent out here.) A wide net was cast, and participants represented Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors (Cisco, Trapeze, Aruba, Motorola, InnerWireless, MobileAccess), medical device vendors (Hospira, Philips Research, GE Healthcare, Sigma International, Smiths Medical, Welch Allyn, Draeger), AAMI, ASHE, the Medical Records Institute, Bosch, Verizon, ECRI Institute, NIST, various academics (Drexler and U of OK besides Villanova and CMU). The only provider organizations attending, besides Partners, were Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Kaiser and the VA. GlobeStar Systems was the lone health care software vendor. As the sole provider among the organizers, the attendee list was somewhat influenced by which vendors are installed in Partner’s Healthcare. Due to limited seating, not everyone who wanted to attend was able to be accommodated.

Elliot kicked things off with a welcome and review of the agenda. Don Witters then came up and set the stage from the safety perspective, and Rick Hampton did the same relative to Partners’ position as a provider organization. We wrapped the first portion of the agenda by going around the room in both locations introducing ourselves. The rest of the day focused on two sets of break out discussions:

• Group A - identifying stakeholders, benefits, challenges, risks
• Group B - Identifying/categorizing critical wireless medical device/network security dimensions/factors for CIA&S (confidentiality, integrity, availability and safety)
• Group C - CIA&S, performance metrics that could/should be cataloged (e.g., QoS, bandwidth, etc.)
• Group D - System design and life cycle maintenance, verification and validation strategies, and sources to assure CIA&S in future applications

Throughout the day discussions sought to identify wireless problems and get to root causes. Continue →