Case Studies


Dr. Pretorius, Phase I – Phase IV, Rustenburg, South Africa
APC Solutions was commissioned by Dr Pretorius’ medical centre to provide a wireless network between a hospital site, two GP practices and the X Strata Mine. The sites, which were situated at different locations within the town and with many high rise buildings and other obstacles in the way, needed to share vital information between the hospital, Medi Clinic and on-call doctors’ home practices to enable efficient diagnosis of patients.
Our solution
APC needed to provide high speed connectivity between all sites including the home GP offices of Dr. Pretorius and Dr. Coetze which would allow the on-call doctors to review the patients’ charts from their own practice, rather than travelling across town to the hospital or Medi Clinic.
The current ADSL broadband service was exceptionally slow and could not deliver a suitable bandwidth. The average X-ray is 90Mbs and in order to transfer the data between sites, a disk of the image had to be couriered to the doctors at their home address. APC designed, surveyed and deployed a wireless network using one Motorola PTP500 and four Ruckus 7731 point-to-point links. This network, once deployed, provided a high-speed robust and flexible network for the doctors in excess of 50Mbs per link – 50 times faster than the previous ADSL service.
This enabled the doctors to review patient’s charts from their on call surgery, eliminating the time it would have taken for the doctor to reach the hospital, saving valuable hours when diagnosing a critical case.
The result
The project was surveyed, deployed and installed from start to finish within a two-week period; with the actual installation taking just two days. APC worked with partners Siemens and Promed to make this successful. The immediateness to which a patient can now be diagnosed has led to unprecedented patient service and almost zero waiting time for diagnosis.