Reliable Wi-Fi connectivity is essential to modern medical facilities, with technology and connected devices playing an increasingly critical role in patient care. Building and maintaining a high-performance Wi-Fi network helps you support medical staff, ensure seamless communication, and provide top-notch patient care.
In this article, we explore some of the most common obstacles faced by hospitals when it comes to managing medical-grade Wi-Fi networks. We’ll describe each obstacle and provide actionable strategies for overcoming them.
We discuss the following topics:
Focus on patient care, not troubleshooting Wi-Fi: Learn more about 7SIGNAL.
To kick things off, let’s look at some physical and environmental hurdles. Specifically:
It’s notoriously difficult to set up wireless networks in hospitals. Consider the physical characteristics of medical environments: dense building materials like concrete and masonry, large metal objects, countless electronic devices, and constantly moving medical equipment—all of which are known to affect and disrupt Wi-Fi signals. Compounding matters, medical devices and IoT (Internet of Things) equipment often compete for the same bandwidth, further degrading performance.
How IT can address these issues:
Wi-Fi dead zones—which are areas where signals are weak or non-existent—make it difficult for your staff to access critical systems wherever and whenever access is required. This disrupts patient care, staff communication, and more. These dead zones often occur in large or isolated areas of a hospital.
How IT can address these issues:
Hospital staff, patients, and visitors are constantly on the move, placing extra stress on your network’s ability to handle seamless transitions between access points. Without proper roaming configurations and constant network monitoring and optimization, jittery connections and dropped signals can also affect communication and patient care.
How IT can address these issues:
Next, let’s turn to the client side of the equation, focusing on:
Hospitals are hectic environments, with constantly fluctuating user and device densities across different areas. Your waiting rooms, for example, may experience predictable demand, but hallways, care rooms, and emergency facilities may see sudden and significant spikes that overwhelm your network.
How IT can address these issues:
Modern hospitals are flooded with connected devices, from smartphones carried in by guests to life-saving IoT medical equipment used in operating rooms and other care settings. And more devices, with increasingly large capacity demands, are on the way. As medical IoT use cases expand and as guests continue to bring in data-hungry personal devices, scaling your network will be a constant challenge.
How IT can address these issues:
Mismanaged bandwidth allocation can lead to frustrating slowdowns or outages. As noted above, hospitals rely on a range of bandwidth-heavy applications like electronic health records (EHR) systems, telemedicine platforms, and video conferencing tools. Think of this as your "operational overhead"—the essential costs to keep things running. But on top of that, there are the “discretionary expenses” of personal devices from staff and guests, which can strain the network further if not managed properly.
How IT can address these issues:
Since hospitals manage a lot of sensitive patient data, they need to be prepared to face both crippling cyberattacks and pressure from strict regulations like HIPAA. Balancing security with usability in such a demanding environment is a constant challenge.
How IT can address these issues:
READ MORE: Why You Need to Optimize Your Hospital's Wi-Fi Network
Wi-Fi networks in hospitals are dynamic, with frequent changes to environmental factors, devices, and user behavior. Without regular monitoring, small issues can escalate into major problems that disrupt operations and compromise patient care.
How IT can address these issues:
We’re always here to answer your Wi-Fi questions at 7SIGNAL. Our enterprise Wi-Fi optimization platform helps you plan and execute a healthier network. Contact us to learn more.
7SIGNAL® is the leader in enterprise Wi-Fi optimization, providing insight into wireless networks and control over Wi-Fi performance so businesses and organizations can thrive. Our cloud-based platform continually tests and measures Wi-Fi performance at the edges of the network, enabling fast solutions to digital experience issues and stronger connections for mission-critical users, devices, and applications. Learn more at www.7signal.com.