Intelligent CIO North America Issue 16 | Page 58

CASE STUDY
Working with partner WrightCore for planning and implementation , Monument Health outfitted its new Heart & Vascular Institute building with an all-Aruba infrastructure , and began a three-year roll-out of Aruba solutions across all of its other facilities , starting with its flagship hospital in Rapid City .
Monument is installing Aruba CX Series core switches in its two data centers , followed by Aruba Wi-Fi 6 access points and CX Series access switches across all locations , as well as ClearPass for network access control and policy management . In addition , the new Heart & Vascular Institute will utilize Aruba Location- Based Services to enable wayfinding in the facility .
Evan Grosz , Director of IT Technical Services for Monument Health , said his team is excited about the greater performance and reliability of the Aruba infrastructure , but even more so about the time savings .
“ The simplicity Aruba delivers saves substantial administrative time for our IT team ,” Grosz noted .
ClearPass was another key factor in Monument Health ’ s decision to choose Aruba . Grosz and his team are eager to use ClearPass ’ s fingerprinting and automatic classification of devices , to replace what was previously a time-consuming and manual process .
Grosz said : “ Being able to configure and fingerprint a device like a printer once and then have all of the same devices automatically placed into the appropriate segregated VLAN is huge .”
The new Aruba network supports Monument Health ’ s key healthcare applications such as MyChart and Epic , but even more importantly , it enables new , cost-saving applications like Voice over IP for nurse communications – something that was impossible with the previous network infrastructure due to performance and reliability issues . In addition , Monument Health is using Aruba Location-based Services in the new building , adding Aruba beacons and a mobile app , to enable wayfinding .
“ Since we weren ’ t able to have a grand , in-person launch , the wayfinding capabilities were helpful to get both staff and visitors acquainted with the new building and help patients find their way around ,” said Grosz . He added that the IT team will look to expand their use of wayfinding in other areas of the hospital and across their entire campus in the future .”
Said Lahr : “ Having a modern , unified network foundation is a game-changer for Monument Health that will allow us to adapt quickly to a rapidly evolving healthcare environment and ultimately , set new standards of care for our patients .”
We asked Stephanie Lahr , Chief Information Officer and Chief Medical Information Officer for Monument Health , further questions to find out more .
Why was it necessary to undertake a complete network overhaul at your company ?
There ’ s a multi-layered answer to this . We were at a point where the technology we were using was basically at the end of its life and needed replacing – that ’ s the easy answer .
The more detailed and complex answer would be to ask why we made a shift in the vendor partner that we had
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