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Recently, we wrote about why hospital patients and staff need access to top-notch medical grade Wi-Fi. In this article, we develop our argument a little further, focusing on the importance of Wi-Fi optimization across hospitals, health systems, and other complex medical environments.
If you’re the CIO, Head of IT, or Director of Networking at a large care facility, you may find this particularly interesting. Here’s what we cover:
LEARN MORE: Boost hospital efficiency with better connected experiences.
What Is Wi-Fi Optimization?
In simple terms, Wi-Fi optimization refers to the active management of a Wi-Fi network with the goal of improving its performance. While home networks and small environments require very little active management, larger networks, such as hospitals, commercial buildings, and other high-traffic venues, require more rigorous attention. In such environments, IT teams tend to rely on network monitoring solutions that enable observation and configuration at scale.
Top-Notch Optimization Focuses on the ‘Why’
When optimizing your network, it’s important to consider its purpose. Indeed, networks are built to accomplish specific goals and these goals differ from environment to environment. For example, an industrial environment is fundamentally different from a maritime environment—and neither have much in common with the Wi-Fi deployed at your local coffee shop. Each one has different connectivity challenges, supports different device types and user profiles, and enables different activities.
To ensure that your network is running optimally, you need to focus on the unique dynamics at play on the demand side of your environment. While standard Wi-Fi optimization considerations like minimizing downtime, maximizing signal strength, and eliminating dead zones generally play a part in this, it’s also important to evaluate how your network is being used in order to make informed optimization decisions. For hospitals and care facilities, this means taking into consideration the usage patterns of clinicians, staff, visitors, patients, their family members, and even IoT-powered medical devices.
The ‘Why’ for Medical Environments
Wi-Fi optimization is vital for hospitals, clinics, care facilities, and other complex medical environments, where reliable connectivity plays an essential role in patient care by supporting efficient operations, customer satisfaction, and telemedicine.
A well-optimized medical grade Wi-Fi network ensures seamless communication between doctors, nurses, and devices, thereby reducing errors and improving overall patient outcomes, while simultaneously supporting quality access for patients and visitors.
In addition…
Medical Environments Are Becoming More Reliant on Wi-Fi
As medical devices, Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, smart badges, and other digital tools shift to cloud-based platforms, Wi-Fi has become a key facilitator of healthcare operations. Wi-Fi now supports not only administrative tasks but also services like telemedicine, real-time monitoring, and digital imaging across multiple devices. Networks must therefore remain robust to support the increasing demands of data, video, and voice services in healthcare environments.
Moreover, for healthcare administrators, a highly optimized Wi-Fi network helps to maintain regulatory compliance (like HIPAA), enhance productivity, and ensure patient safety. As the role of Wi-Fi continues to expand with advancements in telehealth and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices, optimization is crucial for supporting these technologies.
Optimize Your Network, Support Mission-Critical Services and Growth
While you have limited control over the design of individual devices, you can optimize your network infrastructure to guarantee that medical equipment and healthcare applications perform reliably and securely across your entire service area.
Optimizing a medical-grade network involves measuring network KPIs, fine-tuning the access layer, ensuring sufficient spectrum, zeroing in on service issues, uncovering root causes, and managing capacity to accommodate the high density of devices and users.
LEARN MORE: How Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers (CHWC) monitor and optimize Wi-Fi experiences.
7 Reasons to Optimize Your Hospital’s Wi-Fi Network
Let’s dig a little deeper. Optimizing your hospital's Wi-Fi performance goes beyond merely “improving connectivity.” It's about transforming the way healthcare is delivered, ensuring better patient outcomes, streamlining operations, and reducing costs.
Here's why high-performing Wi-Fi networks are essential in modern care settings:
- Patient Experience and HCAHPS
- Clinician and Staff Productivity
- Enhanced Security and Compliance (HIPAA)
- Remote Monitoring
- Enabling New Technologies (Telehealth, IoT, etc.)
- Asset Tracking (Carts, Beds, etc.)
- More Efficient Facilities and Reduced Costs
1. Patient Experience and HCAHPS
Patients don’t see Wi-Fi as a luxury. They expect to stay connected to the people and things that matter most, no matter where they are or what they’re doing. If they can’t, they get frustrated and blame the hospital—either implicitly or explicitly—for failing to meet their needs.
To this end, by offering an efficient, powerful network, capable of supporting non-essential usage demands, you’ll be able to enhance patient experiences. By giving them the ability to easily communicate with loved ones, stream entertainment content from their care rooms, and access critical health information via patient portals, you’ll be adding immense value to your hospital’s offering.
In addition, it’s important to keep in mind that health systems are now evaluated based on Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores. Since these directly impact reimbursement rates, and therefore hospital revenue, it’s important to get them right. While Wi-Fi quality is far from the most important HCAHPS consideration, the fact of the matter is mediocre Wi-Fi will hurt your score.
2. Clinician and Staff Productivity
Healthcare professionals rely on uninterrupted Wi-Fi to access Electronic Health Records (EHR), use mobile medical applications at the point of care, and maintain open communication with other staff. Wi-Fi is also essential for tools like medical carts, “Workstations on Wheels” (WOWs), and Vocera Smartbadges.
By placing an emphasis on proactive Wi-Fi optimization, you can ensure that clinicians and staff are able to access critical information and tools in real-time, from anywhere in the environment. This means you play an important role in eliminating delays in care and improving staff productivity.
3. Enhanced Security and Compliance (HIPAA)
Another reason to optimize your network is to ensure data security over time, especially given strict regulatory standards like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Your network must leverage advanced security protocols to safeguard patient data being stored across hospital databases, medical devices, and other platforms and tools.
Here are some of the most common security considerations for hospitals and medical care facilities:
- Patient Data: This includes patient health records, billing information, and other sensitive data that needs to be encrypted and protected from cyberattacks or unauthorized access. By monitoring your network, you can minimize the risk of data breaches, which are costly from both a financial and reputational perspective.
- Device Authentication: As mentioned previously, the number of connected medical devices is growing quickly, and healthy authentication protocols are required to secure their network access. Indeed, monitoring device-level security is a vital aspect of network performance optimization.
- Real-time Monitoring and Alerts: Continuous network monitoring and automated alerts help detect and respond to potential threats in real time.
- Compliance with HIPAA and Other Regulations: A robust network helps maintain compliance with HIPAA and other regulatory standards by enforcing strict access controls, encryption, and monitoring. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties, making network security a top priority.
4. Remote Monitoring
Maintaining a comprehensive network is also critical for supporting remote patient monitoring solutions, which allow clinicians to track patient health in real-time, even outside of traditional care settings. This is especially important for helping staff manage patients with chronic diseases or who are in post-operative care.
By consistently testing, monitoring, and optimizing your environment, you’ll be better positioned to support remote monitoring devices and ensure that they continue to communicate vital patient data in a timely manner. To this end, you’ll help staff provide top-notch care by enabling data-informed triage decisions, timely interventions, and more.
5. Enabling New Technologies (Telehealth, IoT, etc.)
Along the same lines, modern hospitals are adopting advanced technologies like telehealth and Internet of Things (IoT) devices at a growing pace. These require reliable, high-speed connectivity to function, and better overall traffic management to support at scale.
Telehealth consultations allow patients to meet with doctors remotely, expanding access to care while reducing in-hospital visits. IoT devices such as smart monitors, wearables, and smart infusion pumps improve patient outcomes by providing real-time data to healthcare teams.
Since more devices come online every day, with more complex use cases and greater data demands, continuous optimization is necessary for future-proofing and scaling your network.
6. Asset Tracking (Carts, Beds, etc.)
Wi-Fi-enabled asset tracking systems to monitor the location and status of critical medical equipment such as IV pumps, mobile workstations, and hospital beds.
Optimized Wi-Fi ensures that tracking systems function accurately, reducing the time staff spend searching for equipment. This leads to better resource utilization, enhanced workflows, and fewer interruptions in patient care.
7. More Efficient Facilities and Reduced Costs
A well-optimized Wi-Fi network leads to operational efficiency across the entire facility. It reduces downtime, enhances staff workflows, and supports real-time data sharing, ultimately improving overall hospital performance.
By avoiding delays and inefficiencies, hospitals can reduce unnecessary costs related to extended patient stays, miscommunication, or medical errors. Additionally, optimized Wi-Fi minimizes the need for expensive infrastructure overhauls, offering a long-term, cost-effective solution to growing demands for connectivity.
Wi-Fi Optimization as a Service (WOaaS) For Hospitals and Clinics
With its unique combination of hardware and software elements, the 7SIGNAL Wi-Fi optimization platform enables IT teams to build and manage efficient medical grade Wi-Fi environments from the outside in. In addition, our professional services make our Wi-Fi experts available to assist you in delivering seamless connected experiences.
Medical Grade Wi-Fi Monitoring Technologies
7SIGNAL uses Wi-Fi sensors to gain visibility into WLAN performance and the RF. These enable you to measure traffic to various APs and identify interference, design flaws, settings problems, and areas in your network where performance is lagging—with the root cause data.
In addition, 7SIGNAL leverages a SaaS agent, which is installed on wired and wireless devices (Windows, Android, MacOS, Linux, GoogleTV, iGEL) and used to enhance digital experiences from the client perspective. This means you’ll have insight into how various manufacturers, software versions, adapters, drivers, and other specifications perform on your network.
Performance Dashboards and Professional Services
7SIGNAL’s performance monitoring dashboards enable you to observe and visualize everything in one place. This will help you catch issues in real time, prioritize how you address them, and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Finally, our Wi-Fi experts are available to assist teams that lack in-depth knowledge about medical grade Wi-Fi and building top-notch networks. They will help you understand what your network is 'saying,' contextualize the data captured by 7SIGNAL's monitoring solutions, and recommend changes and upgrades to take your network to the next level.
By providing a comprehensive health overview and allowing deep dives into specific issues, 7SIGNAL ensures that network engineers and IT teams are always a step ahead in ensuring optimal Wi-Fi performance. By complementing WLAN vendors and offering a distinctive outside-in perspective, 7SIGNAL is setting new standards in medical grade Wi-Fi network performance and user experience optimization.
Learn More From the 7SIGNAL Experts
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.