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  5. Case Study: Hospital Uses WLAN To Provide Better Patient Care: Page 2 of 7
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Case Study: Hospital Uses WLAN To Provide Better Patient Care: Page 2 of 7

The WLAN at Overlake Hospital Medical Center proven indispensable to health care at Overlake, as it has at many hospitals around the country.
November 05, 2004
  • Reliability: Hospital networks simply can't go down; lives depend on them. If a physician relies on a wireless network for access to patient information and that network can't deliver, then the quality of health care suffers. At Overlake, this is a situation we absolutely wanted to avoid.

    We achieved the highest level of network reliability by deploying redundant WLAN controllers that could service wireless users in the event that another controller became disabled. In addition, we leveraged real-time radio-frequency (RF) management to let access points (APs) increase power and, therefore, coverage area to negate the loss of a neighboring AP. And we put all WLAN equipment on uninterruptible-power-supply systems, ensuring that the wireless network continues working during power failures. In this respect, the WLAN is more reliable than our wireline network.

  • Security: The Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA) outlines stringent requirements for protecting patient information. This affects a wireless network in two primary ways: First, a network infrastructure must guarantee that only authorized users have access to individual patient records, and second, patient information must be transferred in a secure fashion. HIPAA doesn't dictate how these goals are accomplished, but, in most cases, it requires tight access control, advanced authentication techniques, and a variety of encryption tools for enhanced privacy. Unfortunately, various client devices—PDAs, tablets, PCs, and voice handsets—have different capabilities when it comes to security. Therefore, our wireless network had to be flexible enough to accommodate these devices and meet the stringent security requirements.
  • Ease of use: Our hospital doesn't have a large IT staff; in fact, our entire networking infrastructure, including routers and switches, is managed by a single individual. In addition to his traditional wireline-networking responsibilities, this person would take on managing the wireless network; we simply couldn't afford to dedicate an additional resource to the exclusive management of a WLAN. We contracted a local VAR to help with the installation, but the day-to-day operations fall squarely on my team's shoulders. We needed a WLAN solution that was easy to manage, without requiring a great deal of attention. Otherwise, the operational expenditures of this project would make the endeavor much more difficult to handle.
  • Seamless roaming: Mobility is the key to our overall plan. If doctors, nurses, and support staff couldn't continuously use Overlake's applications as they moved through different rooms and departments, then the value of the wireless LAN—and our mobile health-care initiative—would be in jeopardy. Surprisingly, this was a major impediment in the first set of WLAN products we evaluated. Though these products established adequate stand-alone pockets of coverage, they didn't function as an end-to-end system. This might have sufficed for some applications, but it was unacceptable for others—for example, voice. Consequently, seamless roaming rapidly emerged as one of our biggest evaluation criteria.

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