A communication gateway wristband serves as a source of patient identification and as an interface between a personal area network (PAN) of miniaturized electronic medical sensors on a patient and a wireless wide-area network (WWAN) such as a hospital network. The gateway wristband includes a PAN transceiver which can establish wireless data links with wireless medical sensors, a WWAN transceiver which can establish a wireless data link with WWAN infrastructure, a memory which stores a patient identifier, and a processor which receives data via the PAN transceiver and relays the patient identifier and the received data to an external network via the WWAN transceiver. The processor manages communications with both the PAN and WWAN transceivers, stores received sensor data in memory, and translates data from the PAN protocol to the WWAN protocol so that sensor data is relayed to the hospital infrastructure.