Mobility and some unique demand veins in Healthcare

By Gary Newbold

MUMBAI, INDIA: Half of the world’s mobile users are in Asia Pacific, with 1.7 billion unique mobile subscribers in the region at the end of 2013 out of the 3.4 billion global subscriber base. The number of Asia Pacific subscribers is expected to grow by 5.5 per cent a year (CAGR) until 2020, reaching 2.4 billion, as per GSMA, June 2014  “Asia Pacific is home to half the world’s mobile subscribers says new GSMA study”.

Mobility is also being greatly adopted in healthcare. It has been fuelled by the unprecedented spread of mobile technologies, as well as advancements in their innovative application to address health priorities, according to a study by Frost & Sullivan, December 2013, “The three big predictions for the global healthcare market”. It is largely supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless devices. More and more mobile solutions are being introduced and implemented in hospitals to enable higher quality patient care, increased patient satisfaction and increased clinician satisfaction.

The increased use of mobile devices in the hospital, whether by medical staff, patients or guests, requires high-performance network infrastructure that is able to ride the mobility wave, provide better management and availability of critical applications within the network, while guaranteeing seamless connectivity and security.

Access demand

Besides patients and guests tapping onto the hospital networks, doctors and other clinical staff at hospitals are also increasingly bringing in mobile devices, seeking to use them at point of care. Additionally, virtualized desktop solutions are fast becoming the norm with clinical access to mobile systems such as electronic medical records (EMR).

This is the standard of services that have come to be expected from all hospitals. While they allow for greater satisfaction for everyone in the hospital, a balance between guest and clinical operations usage within the network needs to be ensured, resulting in the need for an adapted network infrastructure that can support all these ongoing processes simultaneously.

Connectivity demand

The influx of end-user devices accessing the hospital network comes along with the demand for consistent, reliable and continuously available connectivity, especially on the hospital wireless LAN. The wireless networks within any hospital, therefore, need to be properly fortified for any amount of traffic, as it caters to not only the staff, but to patients and guests’ mobile usage as well.

Network infrastructure, wireless networking, wired switches form the critical foundation working behind the scenes to support the BYOD trend, which is increasingly leveraging hospital networks such as Wi-Fi, and enhanced networking capabilities around virtualization support and expanded WLANs are the foundation for enabling virtualized systems and solutions within hospitals.

Security demand

The use of mobile devices brings security challenges along with the necessity to enable seamless access for both doctors and patients. The wireless LAN in hospitals is getting saturated with data and devices as clinicians use laptops and tablets to view and enter patient data. Yet, unrestricted usage could jeopardize patient privacy as well as place an unacceptable burden on the network.

Performance demand

As more life-saving applications are added to the network along with the influx of high bandwidth consumption from mobile users accessing a mix of critical and non-critical applications, having the ability to analyze the network, understand the usage and troubleshooting issues before clinicians and patient lives are impacted becomes critical.

Vision on front; focus on back-end

There is a clear need to modernize the network landscape and provide network intelligence while implementing wireless technologies as hospitals move towards advanced healthcare delivery. The solution should integrate with current systems to maximize current IT resources, and provide better visibility of existing IT systems both from a wired, wireless and application usage level. In order to help support these advancements in the healthcare industry, scalable, secure, intelligent and reliable wired and wireless LAN solutions can be deployed.

The improvements to healthcare organizations in terms of IT agility, flexibility, responsiveness and control will not only enhance the well-being of both patients and healthcare personnel, but also bring numerous economic advantages. A sturdy, intelligent and scalable network foundation can better support the roll out of mobility solutions, which will offer more efficient and productive workflows, and improve the service delivery of the healthcare industry.

(Gary Newbold is Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Extreme Networks. The views expressed here are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of CyberMedia)