Methodist Health System comprises three community hospitals and the highly acclaimed Methodist Women’s Hospital which specializes in women’s health, 30+ physician’s clinics, a medical supplies warehouse and a laundry. They even have Nebraska Methodist College with 1,200 students from which around 65% of graduates join the Methodist nursing and support staff ranks each year.
Doctors and nurses are on the move all day, and they must stay connected at all times. Often with 4 or 5 connected devices in the same spot. With about 2,000 laptops and workstation-on-wheels (WoWs) roaming the wards, almost 1,000 medical staff counting on Cisco wireless phones and Vocera hands-free voice communication badges, and an array of remote scanners and printers, Wi-Fi downtime or instability is simply not an option.
When users complained about dead spots or other connectivity issues, support often struggled to get sufficient details to work on, because healthcare professionals have other priorities – like tending to patients! Consequently, many problems took too long to fix, or never got fixed at all.
They had already deployed a high-availability network core and various mechanisms for WLAN controller failover to ensure that access points rarely go offline, even if the network is degraded, not even during routine maintenance. But they needed more visibility and control of Wi-Fi quality than they could get from Cisco’s standard Wi-Fi management tools.
Then something changed. In 2018 Methodist Health System acquired a new hospital (formerly Fremont Health) and with it, the network team inherited a Wi- Fi solution from Aruba which they were not familiar with. It was too new to retire, so they had to keep it.
Support was already stretched thin and troubleshooting was not getting any easier as the number of connected devices grew. Tim Bertino, Senior Systems Architect was rightfully worried that supporting two Wi-Fi vendors would dilute support and complicate troubleshooting. Was this the moment to step up from reactive support, to proactive Wi-Fi assurance?
If so, they would need a Wi-Fi monitoring platform.
