Sun River Health is one of the United States’ largest federally qualified health centers. It was established in 1975 by four pioneering African American women, who were inspired to make a positive impact on their community after enduring long journeys to clinics to receive their own prenatal care.
After tenaciously pursuing grant funding, Mary Woods, Pearl Woods, Willie Mae Jackson, and Rev. Jeannette J. Phillips — collectively known as Sun River’s Founding Mothers — opened the very first facility in Peekskill, New York. As the organization approaches its fifth decade of serving underprivileged communities, it continues to uphold their remarkable legacy.
With a workforce of over 2,000 individuals, including 400 healthcare providers, they offer a wide range of comprehensive health services, encompassing internal medicine, women's health, pediatrics, dental care, and 14 sub-specialties. Their extensive presence now spans 40+ locations throughout New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson River Valley, serving between 400,000 and 450,000 patients annually.
Sun River Health has a large and complex wireless environment. Across their 40+ ambulatory care clinics, they operate a substantial fleet of 3,500+ wireless endpoints, predominantly consisting of desktop computers, laptops, and smartphones. Their edge-to-edge production environment, supported by Cisco, is equipped with 328 access points configured in a hub-and-spoke arrangement. All of this is managed by a single controller, with FlexConnect deployed to remotely configure and control access points.
While Sun River provides unmonitored guest and partner networks, their network team is primarily focused on ensuring the quality of their production environment. This is of the utmost importance since clinical staff rely heavily on this network to execute mission-critical tasks, like using the EMR to access vital patient information as they move between examination rooms.
Nevertheless, optimizing connectivity experiences proved to be more complex than anticipated. They were faced with the multifaceted challenge of delivering seamless end-user experiences across numerous device types in a variety contexts.
In fact, the issue that finally brought Sun River to 7SIGNAL was a persistent wave of end-user complaints. These originated from clinical staff, passed through various management channels, and eventually reached the highest echelons of the organization.
It reached a point where resolving connectivity issues had become a primary concern for their network team, diverting precious time and resources from more critical workflow-related tasks. The utilization of existing LAN management solutions like Cisco Prime Infrastructure yielded limited results since it could not capture data from end-user devices, leaving them in the dark regarding device information and the root causes of connectivity issues.