The Telecommunications Industry Association has released a new standard covering cabling systems in healthcare facilities. TIA-1179 Healthcare Facility Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard includes requirements for healtchare facilities like hospitals and clinics. It includes specs for cabling performance, topologies and distances as well as pathways and spaces.

In addition to communications systems the cabling standard is meant to support clinical and non-clinical communications systems such as radio frequency identification (RFID), building automation systems, nurse call, security, access control, pharmaceutical inventory and others.

When announcing the standard's publication the TIA noted the TIA-1179 standard recognizes that the meaning of the term "work area" has to take on a broad scope, because in a hospital a work area can be a patient room or even an operating room with communications needs far different from a walled or modular (cubicle) commercial office space.

The TIA-1179 standard is available for purchase - like all TIA standards - from IHS Global.