Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in northwest England has deployed Aruba Networks’ secure wireless solutions at its Arrowe Park and Clatterbridge Hospitals.
The Hospital Trust offers acute healthcare services to thousands of patients and needed a wireless solution to augment staff productivity, track patient data and provide compliance to working time directives.
Aruba Networks, which provides wireless LANs and secure mobility solutions, was selected by the Trust because of its high security offerings and centralized management.
“The Aruba wireless network supports 2,500 healthcare professionals who now have reliable, secure access to Electronic Patient Records and Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS),” said Pete Marsh MBE, Technical Director for Wirral Health Informatics Service.
“Our staff deal with sensitive, time-critical data all day, and immediate access is essential. We now send PACS data securely and reliably to clinicians’ mobile devices, improving efficiency, reducing the risk of transcription errors, and ensuring that compliance protocols are met. As a result both acute and primary care is delivered to patients with greater speed and accuracy than ever before,” said Marsh.
Aruba’s Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) technology reduces the cost involved in Wi-Fi deployment by automating site surveys and also employing infrastructure based controls. This helps optimize Wi-Fi clients performance in real-time.
Individually, Wi-Fi clients generally do not work with other clients or select optimal band, channel and access point. The situation becomes more pronounced in cases where there are densely packed users like in hospitals, lecture halls and libraries.
ARM is able to control how Wi-Fi clients interact ensuring that data, so voice and video applications have enough network resources for optimum operation and enhances the wireless experience for end-users.
Aruba’s centralized architecture offers switch-like performance reducing IT operating expenses by scaling down network set-up, expansion and updates. This centralized architecture helps manage the network whether in a single campus or a large enterprise with minimum IT staff.
Bob Vickers, Aruba’s U.K. sales director explained that the Trust was known for its innovations in the field of mobile healthcare technologies, including early wireless systems and wearable computers. This required a new wireless infrastructure which could take care of their management.
Vickers said that Aruba’s centralized management and high security made the network easy to install and configure besides ensuring that privacy was maintained for patient-related data. This resulted in improved staff performance and thereby better patient experience.
Shamila Janakiraman is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Shamila’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
