Schmidt Consulting Group, Inc. | Consulting Engineers | Healthcare | Shands Hospital

Schmidt Consulting Group, Inc. provided telecommunication design services for the Shands Hospital. Shands Hospital, headquartered at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL, is one the country's leading healthcare providers and medical education facilities. The Hospital complex includes over 1,000,000 square feet of patient care, educational, and research space for the medical field.

SCG developed a communications technology infrastructure master plan for the 600+ bed Patient Services Building for this immense facility. The staff at Shands recognized that the current communications infrastructure did not meet the current and future technology requirements for size, space, and network connectivity.

Shands hired SCG to help assess their current conditions and to address the immediate needs for additional and updated network hardware and improve communications closet space planning.

By fulfilling these goals, we laid the groundwork for improving telephone system physical redundancy, improving data network reliability and redundancy, and providing space for all future (and current) technology requirements. One of the main goals of the project was to upgrade the current communications closet and cabling infrastructure. At the time, there were 53 communications closets in the facility. Many of these closets are less than 15 square feet, yet served areas over 15,000 square feet. These closets were inadequately sized to meet the current and future technology requirements. We recommended and designed a plan to improve this infrastructure by expanding the rooms to have adequate space for all systems, including nurse call, code blue, security, and paging.

The plan was developed to address the physical technology infrastructures that deliver specific software applications to the user and will focus on improving the flexibility, functionality, redundancy and reliability for the communications systems. The plan provided high-level scheduling and cost information as well as detailed design components in order to implement the estimated 2.2M in upgrades. Originally created in 2002, this long-term technology plan will serve as a blueprint for future planning and development of technology activities through FY2010.

Back to Healthcare