The Problem
To care for patients at a Florida-based medical center, clinicians rely on workstations on wheels, or WOWs, to access the center’s EMR system, document patients’ conditions, and distribute medication.
The medical center’s radiology staff, many of whom work remotely, also rely on Wi-Fi to upload MRIs and X-rays to the medical center’s archiving and communication system. With the archiving system, radiologists quickly review and direct treatment of patients.
“With Wi-Fi, we’re monitoring infusion pumps, blood pressure, and uploading information on patients’ vitals,” says the medical center’s director of Engineering and Telecom. “Our wireless network is clinical; it’s about life safety. Wi-Fi even helps patients order meals.”
The engineering and telecom director leads a team responsible for Wi-Fi infrastructure at the center’s more than a dozen facilities. The medical center uses more than 500 7SIGNAL agents and 37 sensors and has been a customer since 2022.
Staying Connected to Patients
“I’ve been with the medical center just over four years,” adds the engineering and telecom director. “During that time, there’s been a lot of construction and growth. When I joined, there were wireless issues.”
For example, before 7SIGNAL, the director says clinicians using WOWs experienced intermittent connectivity, causing delays accessing the EMR system and disrupting bedside documentation and medication distribution to patients. There was also a location on the medical center campus where clinicians were using new WOWs, on a newly opened floor. The nurses kept telling the IT team, “The wireless is very bad in this area.”
For its radiology staff, the center invested in beefy machines, monitors, and speedy internet connections to make sure radiologists working remotely could easily upload and download medical images. Yet staff regularly reported slow MRI image uploads to the medical center’s archive system, delaying radiologists’ reviews and impacting how quickly physicians treat patients. As complaints poured in about Wi-Fi, the director says his IT team couldn’t confirm if Wi-Fi was the cause of the delays.
Between the WOWs and radiologists, he says every week there were at least 10 incidents attributed to problems with Wi-Fi.
A Monitoring System IT Couldn’t See Into
Another challenge for the director was with devices embedded on the center’s patient monitoring system. The system runs a version of Windows that the medical center intentionally walls off, so the IT team struggled to diagnose the cause of roaming and authentication issues because it couldn’t install monitoring tools.
“The wireless network is extremely important; we had to improve performance and make it stable,” he says. “We use Cisco DNA to manage the wireless environment. Cisco is great for monitoring the network’s point of view. But we needed a device-side view.”