Point me in the right direction, please!

Hi, friends, I could use some ideas.

My facility is building a new hospital, and the meetings are underway with the architects. My manager gave me the job of recommending what monitoring system to use. Ours is so old that it isn't worth transferring over.

So I asked her where to start, and she recommended the Internet, and so I immediately thought of allnurses!

We are critical care access, so we will be a 25 bed inpatient facility. This includes med-surg, tele, ICU and Ob. There will be 3 LDR rooms, but the other 22 need to be extremely versatile and all alike.

My question for you is... what brand/company of tele monitoring systems are you familiar with?? do you love it? hate it? recommend it? not ?

We will need a central monitor, but do you think we need 2 ? My understanding is the unit will be circular around a nurses station , but with a hallway thru the middle. this seperates it into two halves, to allow some distinction between types of pt's , and yet still be 'all together'.

Most of our monitoring is telemetry, so that's not so bad. But we will have to have the abiltiy to have real ICU pt's, cardiac drips, possibly the rare vent pt.

My manager said she's thinking of something portable, like an ER would have, for the higher acuity pt's. something we can roll in and out to setup for these pts. I think the idea is fine, but does something that versatile really exist?

Does anyone interact with there monitoring company? We've had problems in the past with ours not responding in a very "timely" fashion when we have problems.

I really appreciate any/all ideas.