5th Annual Pro AV Spotlight Awards Best Healthcare AV Installation: Baystate Medical Center, Springfield, Mass.
Jul 16, 2012 12:30 PM
Award Winners
Best Education AV Installation
Best Entertainment/Arts AV Installation
Best Corporate AV Installation
Best Hospitality/Restaurant/Casino AV Installation
Best Government AV Installation
Human Circuit, Gaithersburg, Md.
The Baystate operating rooms of the future at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., are housed within a visionary new 641,000-square-foot facility that encompasses the MassMutual Wing, the Davis Family Heart and Vascular Center, new patient care units, a greatly expanded emergency department, and a shell space for future growth. With the expansion, Baystate Medical Center will be a 716-bed facility with 57 bassinets. It is the only Level 1 trauma center in western Massachusetts, treating the most critical and urgent cases in the region. Honored as a Thomson Reuters Top 100 U.S. hospital, one of Leapfrog Group’s Top 65 U.S. hospitals for quality and efficiency, and a Magnet hospital for nursing excellence, Baystate’s expansion goal was driven by prioritizing the patient point of view.
Specifically, for the six Operating Rooms of the Future, surgeons and staff needed an intuitive interface for communicating with the control room, previewing video, and controlling presets for video routing. Video from operating room cameras, scopes, and other medical imaging equipment needed to be viewed in realtime as well as recorded for video on demand. Surgeons and staff further needed a convenient way to connect medical imaging devices for monitoring and recording. A Mirial integrated soft videophone (SIP) allows for video communication between the operating rooms and the control room.
Technically speaking, the goal of the $630,000 project was to move away from the cost and technical limitations imposed by purpose-built touchpanels and to create a new untethered workflow system that was innovative and easy to use for system control, communication, and video distribution in the OR. Now handheld devices such as iPad, tablets, and smart phones can be used by surgeons and staff to control the room.
To this end, Human Circuit, in collaboration with The Drake Systems Group/AV Consultants, designed and installed video interfaces in surgical booms, which interact with a system controlled by an intuitive, HTML-based control system that can be used from virtually any computer or device with a web browser. This same control methodology—using common web development tools—supports the video interfaces, scalers, routers, encoders, and servers that comprise the Video on Demand capture and playback system. Video is encoded as MPEG4 by a software encoder and multicast over Ethernet (IGMP) for realtime preview and recording to hard drives for VOD.
Baystate has activated a support agreement that allows Human Circuit to actively and remotely maintain and monitor the system and how it’s being used from the company Network Operations Center (NOC).
This hospital is one of the busiest in the region with hundreds of surgeries scheduled each week. The staff realized that control and surgical suite communication and management along with video on demand, recording, and monitoring of other medical imaging devices would ultimately be cost effective and increase workflow.
Key equipment includes a range of Atlona scaler/converters; Axis PTZ cameras; Barco surgical LCD; DVI-I, VGA, and video inputs; Chief mounts; Biamp audio inputs; Blackmagic video capture; Middle Atlantic racks; JBL ceiling speakers; Fostex monitor speakers; Samsung LED displays; Sennheiser and Shure mics; Raritan power amps; a Tangent medical-grade all-in-one touchpanel/computer; Extron switching; and a TVOne dual PIP DVI-I scaler.
