And there were similar employee retention benefits in the transcription department, he said, especially for mothers "who didn't want to pack up and head out" to an office and could instead stay at home to work.

John Wade, vice president and CIO of Saint Luke's Health System of Kansas City, said that organization's wireless rollout actually ended up being a matter of life and death.

The system wirelessly connects staff, tracks patients and decreases treatment response time, among other things. Wade displayed a graph that indicated the health system's percentage of ischemic stroke patients who received time-sensitive, life-saving treatment was many times the national average.

Wade said it has been determined that for several patients, if the wireless system wasn't in place in areas such as intensive care and cardiology, "that person would be dead."

It wasn't quite so serious for Cox Communications when some its laptops were stolen, but the company was happy to find out that its wireless capabilities could help retrieve them.