Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA
The Hershey Medical Center campus encompasses millions of square feet of clinical hospital and medical research space in south central, PA. It is also home to the Pennsylvania State University’s medical school and academic medical center.
Problem
When it came time to construct a new 300,000 square feet Children’s Hospital on the campus, administrators recognized the need to include a multi-technology distributed antenna system in order to enable numerous wireless technologies and applications. Complaints about cellular performance as well as paging and the local public safety network coverage throughout the campus were driving factors in the decision to include a DAS as part of the construction requirements.
Solution
Intenna Systems worked with medical center personnel to understand a very complex set of needs and requirements before designing and deploying a multi-technology DAS that delivered on the desired capabilities. The DAS was not only built to handle cellular frequencies but also low band paging, 2-way radio and local public safety network frequencies over a converged DAS architecture. The Children’s Hospital DAS was commissioned in early 2014. Since then, the DAS has expanded to cover 2.2M square feet of the campus, with plans to expand again in the near future. Hershey Medical Center maintains ownership of the DAS and Intenna provides ongoing monitoring and maintenance.
