At the time of this publishing, hospital operations included 359 beds, 900 Cisco WLAN access points (APs), with over 800 Wi-Fi connected clients running critical applications such as IV-pumps, VoIP voice calls, Computers on Wheels, laptops, tablets and PDAs, access to electronic medical records and billing systems. Not to mention guest access from patients and visitors. The number of wireless devices used for medical and patient care purposes was expected to triple within two years and continue growing rapidly in the future.
The hospital’s WLAN was not considered reliable for hospital communications, because there was frequent degradation of quality and connectivity. “Our goal is to make wireless serve medical applications at all times. This is a special challenge in an IT network using lightly-regulated WLAN frequencies where your network operation is continuously impacted by the number of devices and traffic patterns in hospital and guest networks; different device types and driver versions, and WLAN configuration changes” recounted Russ Johnson, Network Manager at Akron Children’s Hospital. “If you don’t know how service is delivered to end users, you don’t know enough. We did not have this visibility and were suffering.”