Jan 29
2014
Carnegie Tri-County Municipal Hospital Goes Wireless to Improve Productivity, Patient Experiences
Carnegie Tri-County Municipal Hospital, a 21-bed facility in rural Oklahoma, was experiencing growing demand for wireless networking from their staff and patients. The hospital, which houses several clinics, offices and offers a variety of outpatient services, would benefit from a mobile Wi-Fi network improving staff productivity and patient experience. So leadership formulated a plan to upgrade its existing network with enhanced wireless access throughout the facility, as well as increase security and simplify management.
They approached Carnegie Telephone, the hospital’s telephone service provider, with the goal of obtaining a managed solution that met these requirements:
- High-performance wireless network that could be segmented in to three mutually isolated networks – one for employees, one for patients and their families and the last for equipment like scanners, printers and other Wi-Fi enabled medical equipment
- The network had to be easily and remotely manageable by Carnegie, ensuring quick deployment and trouble shooting for maximum uptime
- Implementation on a limited budget for capital investment
Carnegie Telephone has been serving Oklahoma since 1903. It is been on the forefront of offering digital communications, HDTV and fiber broadband. To meet Carnegie Tri-County Municipal Hospital’s demands, Carnegie Telephone required a security appliance with features including content filtering, as well as Ethernet switches and high-performance wireless access points (APs).
In their product selection for the Carnegie Tri-County Municipal Hospital’s wireless network, Carnegie Telephone discovered a wireless APs. These APs had all the important enterprise features like multiple SSIDs and VLAN support to build multiple virtual wireless networks for the hospital. But the real kicker was a built-in controller that could be used to control up to 24 other Aps, from provider ZyXEL.