Windom Area Hospital serves Windom, a growing city, in the county seat of Cottonwood County, in the South West of Minnesota. The first hospital was opened in 1905 but the current facility dates back to 1975 when the growth of the area justified a new hospital which was built and owned by the City of Windom. The hospital has been on a consistent growth path since then with the most recent additions being a new ER block in 1998 and in 2004 a further Outreach expansion with the addition of new patient care wing including the Birth Place, and an OB wing. In 1989 the hospital entered into an agreement with Sanford Health to provide services to the hospital.

The Challenges and Goals

The Nation’s healthcare industry is in a state of continuous change with many new legislations and new advanced technologies being introduced. All of this is adding to the complexity of managing a healthcare facility  while keeping costs at a manageable  level and still maintaining reasonable standards of excellence. Windom Area Hospital has  enjoyed strong growth over the past years which has added to these challenges. The current wave of change relates to the legislation to introduce Electronic Health Record systems on a National basis. To help enable this, the Federal Government has established financial incentives through the HITECH Act. These incentives also come with governing rules the most pervasive of these being termed “Meaningful Use”. This was one of the driving forces to bring Windom to review their communication network system.

“ It is key for us to meet the  Meaningful Use standards including the interoperability requirements of Stage 3 so that we qualify for the incentives” said Lori Ling, IT coordinator for Windom and manager of the Phenomenal upgrade project. “Of course that also includes other challenges such as continuing to meet the HIPAA security rules.”  Windom was experiencing quality and down time issues with their existing hosted voice service. They also needed to update their wireless system functionality and make their network system more reliable—all with a goal of ensuring a consistent and effective upgrade path to enable easier future growth. One of the ongoing goals is to create a Paperless and Filmless environment. A major solution to this was to electronically transfer films via a PACS system. The new network system needed to accommodate and secure the connections to the four services from Mayo, Siemens, GE and Virtual that were already in place.  All of this had to be accomplished with a limited budget and without any major disturbance.