Located in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains of southeastern Kentucky, Pikeville is where the colorful Hillbilly Festival celebrates Appalachian culture every year. Part of that colorful history includes the infamous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys in the late 1800s.
About 9,000 souls live in Pikeville. An unlikely place that most people would expect to be home to two universities and one of the state’s largest, most advanced health care centers. But it is.
Called the Pikeville Medical Center (PMC), its 261-bed general hospital has an outstanding reputation and was named “Hospital of the Year” in 2012 for the third year in a row by the American Alliance of Healthcare Providers. PMC’s large campus also includes two other medical buildings. Altogether they provide more than 400 patient services, including every major specialty and most subspecialties.
In April 2014, the PMC formally opened a new, 11-story, $150 million clinic and office building, along with a separate 10-story parking ramp for 1,200 vehicles. Besides the clinic, the 235,362 sq. ft. building has 38 outpatient examination rooms, an operating room, recovery suite, and a number of physician and administration offices.
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One of the more unique amenities of the new facility is an advanced television distribution network system that delivers crisp, high definition reception, and “future proofs” the building for IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) at a later date. The network includes 111 flat-screen TVs in many of the waiting rooms, other public areas, break rooms and offices.
“We wanted to move away from traditional coax cable to a universal Category 6 cabling network that could deliver IPTV when that technology becomes less expensive and more widely accepted. IPTV is still in the developmental stages, so we wanted to hold off on it for a while,” says Clinton Coleman, telecommunications specialist for PMC.
Electronic Nervous System
Tying the whole TV system together is 600,000 ft. (114 miles) of Category 6 cable which delivers gigabit Ethernet data communications, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telecommunications to several hundred data drops, and digital television to all 111 flat-screen TVs. Cat 6 cable makes high speed data transmission possible by reducing system noise and minimizing “pair-to-pair cross talk.”
When the project was being planned, Coleman and his colleagues searched the web and reached out to colleagues to determine what kind of infrastructure and datacom equipment would be best for the building. They soon found Lynx Broadband, a Minneapolis company that designs and manufactures equipment for use with Cat 6 cable.
Coleman contacted the company and explained the TV requirements for his application in the new building. Shortly afterwards, Lynx prepared a detailed “system design,” that showed the signal strengths and equipment layout for delivering signals to the cabling networks on each floor, which in turn sends them to points of use.
“The system design was thoroughly documented with drawings and signal strength information,” Coleman remembers. “We had confidence in the design and liked the concept, so we selected the Lynx equipment.”
Editor’s note: We can’t help but notice the stark difference between SNL’s take on an Appalachian hospital and this $150 million facility.
