It's Time for a Change

There are two big changes that will soon affect the wireless nurse call and security systems industry. As the owner, administrator, or employee of a senior living community, it’s important to know what these changes are and how they may affect your facility.

FA vs. EN

Some of you may already be feeling the pinch from the first change; an industry-wide switch from FA to EN technology. FA, or Frequency Agile, wireless products were the standard for many years in a lot of systems. Anyone who uses a wireless nurse call system that was installed more than two or three years ago probably has FA technology. While this technology is reliable and will continue to function for its users, finding replacement parts is already difficult, and will soon become impossible.

Why? EN, or EchoStream, is the next generation of wireless technology. EN is more reliable and allows software creators to add more functionality.

Most projections show that FA will be completely unavailable by 2014. You should have been contacted by the company that installed your current system if an upgrade is required. If you’re unsure whether or not your system will have to make the change from FA to EN, contact a PalatiumCare representative.

If you know you have to make a change, now is a great time to consider whether your call system is addressing all your needs. A PalatiumCare system could  provide additional features for less than the cost of updating your existing system.

FCC Narrowbanding Mandate

Does your current nurse call system utilize pagers or radios? Then you may be facing a change at the end of next year.

In December 2004, the FCC decided that all land-mobile radio users in the VHF and UHF range must operate at 12.5 kHz efficiency. Don’t understand what that means? Don’t worry. Again, a PalatiumCare representative would be happy to assist you in finding out if your current call system will be affected.

If you do need to make the change to 12.5 kHz efficiency, the process of switching will depend on what system you have. Most paging transmitters sold in the last 10-15 years were made to be switched to narrowband eventually, so you’ll just have to get them reprogrammed. Not all devices are capable of changing over, though, so you may have to purchase new pagers or radios.

Learn more about the FCC Narrowbanding Mandate at http://www.palatiumcare.com/.

Kirt Graves
Sales Representative
kgraves@palatiumcare.com