THE 3 C’S OF HOSPITAL WIFI: COVERAGE, CAPACITY, AND CONTROL
When it comes to building a hospital wireless network, the single most important thing to design for is reliability. Unlike corporate networks where profits and productivity are at stake, the reliability of a hospital’s network is tied to the safety — and the lives — of its patients.
While this may sound like common sense — a wireless network should always plan to be reliable, after all — other considerations can take the front seat during the planning process (like deadlines and budgets) making the goal of reliability feel a bit out of reach. To stay on track, focus on solving for three main areas: coverage, capacity, and control. By doing so, you’ll ensure your healthcare WIFI network is robust and reliable.
Challenges of designing a reliable hospital wireless network
High standards for healthcare information security make designing a network challenging, but where the network will be implemented — inside a hospital — makes it even more difficult. That’s why the first step to setting up any hospital WLAN should be conducting a comprehensive site survey to identify both physical and digital obstacles. In a hospital environment, there are plenty:
- Complex floor plans and large campuses
- High-security requirements and HIPPA compliance
- Radio-frequency interference caused by medical equipment
- Signal-blocking building features and materials
- Connected medical devices requiring large amounts of bandwidth
- Visitor access causing unpredictable spikes in traffic
- The life and death aspect of healthcare
Since hospitals are unique environments, it’s wise to allow plenty of time for site assessments. Depending on the size of the facility, this step could take a few months. Once you understand your challenges, it’s time to solve for the three C’s: coverage, capacity, and control.
COVERAGE: Devices need to work everywhere on a hospital’s campus
Hospital staff is always on the go, and their devices need to work reliably wherever they are. This makes coverage key when planning a hospital wireless network. While typical enterprise wireless networks can get away with a few dead zones — they’re almost expected in elevators and remote parts of office buildings — that won’t fly in a hospital. Coverage needs to reach every corner of the campus.
Unfortunately, most healthcare facilities were not built with WIFI in mind. Many hospitals were built long before WIFI existed. Your initial site survey should help you identify all the challenges you’ll need to contend with, including things like convoluted floor plans, signal-blocking building materials, and large campuses. Taking note of these obstacles and planning for them will help you create a wireless network that delivers the coverage you need to keep staff connected and able to respond in real-time — no matter where they are.
CAPACITY: Networks need to handle more traffic — and more kinds of traffic
Over the last few years, hospital wireless networks have become an indispensable part of the healthcare IT ecosystem, carrying more traffic and more types of traffic than ever. Which means you need to be prepared for the volume of traffic on your new network to keep increasing — requiring more capacity than you may currently be anticipating.
Consider this: the average hospital room can have 15–20 medical devices connected to WIFI. Multiply that by the number of rooms in the hospital, and it’s easy to see the strain that just the medical equipment can have on a network’s bandwidth. Add to that mobile medical devices and workstations, physicians’ smartphones, and visitors’ laptops, and the need for a highly robust network is indisputable.
The good news? If you design your hospital’s WIFI network to account for ever-increasing traffic today, you can avoid costly retrofits in the future. In short, plan for capacity.
CONTROL: Mission-critical data MUST get through
A high volume of traffic on your network means potential slow-downs and the risk of critical data not getting through — which is not an option in a hospital setting. Thankfully, there are network management solutions that give administrators a complete view of their networks and the devices running on them. Adding these visibility tools to your network’s design at the get-go satisfies the need for the third C of hospital wireless networks: Control.
Network visibility tools let you sidestep potential disasters that can accompany an incredibly busy wireless network by letting you control what devices access your network and when, allowing you to stop unwanted traffic from slowing down, or completely interrupting, the transfer of critical data.
These tools can also help identify potentially dangerous malfunctions that can jeopardize security — and a data breach that results in a HIPPA violation is something no hospital wants on their record.
Another benefit of network management tools? They can help find periods when usage is lower, making it possible to conduct system updates when it’s the least disruptive to daily operations. Given the always-on nature of the hospital environment, this level of control can be invaluable.
CONCLUSION: Protect your patients by designing for reliability
From the bedside to the hospital pharmacy, new technologies and the “hi-tech” hospital are making for better patient care but will only be as effective as their wireless network allows. A little planning goes a long way to ensuring that the network will be reliable 24/7/365. Keeping coverage, capacity, and control in mind while designing your hospital’s WIFI network will help ensure your network will be reliable, minimizing outages and protecting both your patients’ safety and their lives.
