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Brad,
Sounds like you have a good handle of the situation, you just might not know it. I would guess that you do have some co-channel interference. I work in a hospital environment as well, and covering these places is very difficult. First, check with your handset vendor and see if they have a deployment guide often they have recommendations. Some of the recommendations I have seen are to match the phone and AP transmit power. This may make pico style (8dBm) cells difficult. Also if the phones are b only then they are likely to be transmitting at 1Mb/s. Which means you may want to consider turning off 802.11g on the radios. I know they paid for an 802.11g network but this may help the clients. If they are 802.11g capable, then it will be hard to get the higher data rates with lower RSSI values, I usually hear -60 to -70dBm is the "voice" RSSI however, you may need a lower RSSI like -40 to -50 to get the 54 Mb/s g rates. Because the 2.4 GHz propagates pretty well, you may just want to try turning up the power and disabling radios where they are not needed. Remember it isn't just the transmit power of the AP that is important as the client can cause interference too, except it may be harder to identify since it moves around all day unless you have Transmit Power Control on your phones. I have given up on radio management; put in a static channel plan. These are infrastructure devices they should not need to changed on a daily basis. You mention this is a test so, a few phones may work in a pilot mode but take into consideration what the end result may look like. If you are going to have say 300+ wifi phones in your facility. You might consider going to an 802.11a phone. Well those are my thoughts.