Intelligent CIO North America Issue 16 | Page 59

CASE STUDY and what were we really looking for beyond just doing a one-to-one replacement for what we had in place ?
The networking technology has evolved a lot over the last several years and within the healthcare spectrum everything that we ’ re doing today is technology-centric .
The network is the highway that everything has to run on and so it was a very important decision for us to really dig into how the technology had evolved to start to support a heavy IoT landscape where basically anything and everything may be connected to the network .
We asked how do we manage that traffic and how do we manage the security of that ? As we put the different aspects together and started to look at the landscape of who was out there and what was happening from an innovative perspective in those areas , we really felt like Aruba was the partner that was going to take us forward because we know as we move forward with other technology investments , we had the best sort of foundational structure to move ahead with .
How important is good network performance to the operation of your business ?

IT WAS CLEAR WE NEEDED A MORE MODERN AND

MOBILE-FIRST APPROACH .

leveraging partnerships where there ’ s automated tools , and to an extent and whenever possible AI and algorithms built in the background , so that we can have the people that do work for us doing the highest level thinking and having the system do the lower level easier pieces of that and only getting our people involved when we really need to . So those were absolutely elements that we were drawn to .
How has the network given you a push for a mobile first approach ?
I think our underlying infrastructure is central to again getting people to buy into the idea that we ’ re going to fully leverage technology . Once that foundation is there , in terms of the mobile element Wi-Fi is everything right now .
Essential . If I can ’ t deliver the tools we are using to people , they aren ’ t worth anything . So it ’ s absolutely essential that the network , both the wired network and the wireless network , are reliable and sit in the background – a ‘ set it and forget ’ it as the end-users would think – but it ’ s really highly technical to make sure that we ’ re giving the appropriate bandwidth to each item and doing hierarchical management and things like that . We really can ’ t deliver care these days without technology and that technology is all riding on the network .
How is the Aruba network allowing you to capitalize on real time data collection ?
One of the great things that we have available through Aruba is some monitoring that allows us to be able to understand the traffic that ’ s happening on the network in real time .
During COVID , our nurses ’ use of mobile devices for scanning medications had an even higher level of interest because we found ourselves using mobile devices in situations where we weren ’ t before . Because we could leave them in a patient ’ s room or we could create a communication strategy , that wasn ’ t so dependent on somebody being in the room but it did mean a device needed to be there and without the connectivity we can ’ t make that happen .
One of the other things that we ’ re looking at is , for example , monitoring with video and audio devices that monitor patients from a safety perspective .
Those have to be connected all the time and we do sometimes move those because a patient who might need to be monitored isn ’ t always in the same place . And so those devices have to be able to move , we need to know where they are and they need to remain connected to the network .
We can actually set automated tools to do some of that for us as well , because one of the other things that we ’ re all facing is staffing challenges and an inability to have all the right people all the time to be doing things manually for sure .
So we ’ re looking for partnerships in networking and really all across the spectrum to make sure that we ’ re
So everything we ’ re doing right now is mobile in a traditional sense , but also mobile more from an elasticity perspective . We might need to change a room into a more ICU level room , and by leveraging mobile tools we can bring elements into that room that may not stay there permanently . Again , all we have to do is bring them in , connect them to the network and we ’ re off and running . p
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA 59