Great Lakes Health completed a system-wide Fieldmesh deployment this month, bringing roughly 22,000 connected devices across 14 campuses onto one gateway fabric.

Before the project, device telemetry at Great Lakes ran over four networks that had arrived at different times for different reasons. Each had its own gateways, its own management console, its own spare parts, and its own idea of what a device identifier looked like. Nothing was broken. It was simply four of everything.

What the rollout looked like

Six weeks of installation, campus by campus, starting with the smallest. The order was deliberate: the first campus is where you find out what your survey missed, and you would rather find that out somewhere with 400 devices than somewhere with 4,000.

Gateways went in alongside the existing networks rather than replacing them. Devices moved across in groups, and the old network stayed live until the group had been stable for a week. At no point was a campus running only on equipment that had been in place for less than seven days.

Deployment at a glance

Campuses
14, across three states
Devices migrated
21,940
Gateways installed
1,180
Elapsed time
6 weeks, first install to final cutover
Networks retired
4
Clinical downtime
None scheduled, none taken

The hard part was not the network

It was the device inventory. Four systems had four records of what existed, and none of them fully agreed. Roughly 1,400 devices appeared in more than one system under different identifiers, and something on the order of 300 appeared in none of them at all.

Reconciling that took longer than installing the gateways, and it is the part of the project we would spend more time on if we did it again. It is also the part that produced the most durable value, because the clinical engineering team came out of it with one inventory that is actually correct.

We thought we were buying a network. What we got that we did not expect was an honest list of what we own.

Dr. Aisha Bennett, Chief Medical Information Officer, Great Lakes Health

Where it stands now

All 14 campuses are live. Telemetry flows into the Great Lakes clinical record through HL7 v2 for existing interfaces and FHIR R4 for anything built since 2024. Firmware updates that previously required a technician with a cart now go out from Formcloud, staged by device group, with a rollback path that does not need a site visit.

The next phase covers ambulatory sites, roughly 60 locations with between five and forty devices each. That is a different problem: less density, more variety, and no on-site technical staff. It starts in the autumn.