High-Tech at the Sickbed: Optimum patient care thanks to efficient data management

Progress in Traditional Clinical Centre
On the one hand, the clinical centre Kulmbach looks back on a very long tradition, which began in the year 1802. On the other hand, the clinical centre, which is managed by the communal authorities, proves to be very progressive: The management of the clinical centre did not only extend the bed capacity over the years by means of several additions and modernisation measures to 450. It also consistently relies on new technologies with the aim to continuously improve patient care. One milestone is the introduction of the electronic patient record and the central data storage by means of the specially acquired software by the company Dräger. In order to exploit all advantages – especially in terms of the fast availability of all the information – as many data records as possible should be transferred automatically and in real-time to the system. This proved to be a particular challenge in the case of intensive care patients, who need to be monitored 24/7 without interruption.

Switching at the Sickbed
The application of switching technology in medical rooms brings along its own requirements: In order to protect the patients and devices from fault currents, it is necessary to comply with the required ISO standards and to galvanically separate the individual accesses from each other. In addition, the systems have to ensure that sensitive patient data is transferred very securely and with high availability. Alexander Wintchen, the IT administrator of the clinical centre and responsible project manager, explains: "These comprehensive security requirements were only fulfilled by the Medical Switches of MICROSENS. They even exceed the requirements of the ISO standards and provide additional protection mechanisms. This made the decision for these systems an obvious and easy one." MICROSENS developed the Medical Switches specifically for the requirements of the medical environment. They accommodate four galvanically separated ports with 10/100/1000 Mbps for the local connection of the devices. The Gigabit access can be realised both with copper and fiber optic connections.  In addition, Medical Micro Switches do not need their own 230 V power supply cords, since they are provided with power via Power over Ethernet using the copper uplink. This reduces the planning and implementation effort significantly.