Hospitals Centralize Network Management to Support Connected Devices
It’s no secret that the Internet of Things is making its way into hospitals — adding a litany of new devices to hospital networks everywhere. In fact, according to a recent survey from Aruba Networks, by next year, 87 percent of healthcare organizations will have adopted IoT.
All these new devices can offer hospitals extraordinary benefits and visibility into their operations and assets. Real-time tracking tools, for instance, are being tapped by many healthcare organizations in order to create more dynamic workflows and better track devices, equipment and staff. Meanwhile, wayfinding technology can help hospitals reduce anxiety for campus visitors by making it easier for patients to find parking and buildings.
But IoT also means more complicated networks for IT teams to manage. While security is pegged as the main issue for IoT, device and network management can also prove to be a massive task for healthcare organizations to handle.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Secures Connected Devices
Like other healthcare organizations worldwide, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles faced the need to effectively and securely connect and manage an exploding number of connected devices on its network. The need came about particularly as it was making strides to adopt new and emerging tech, like virtual reality.
The organization had gone from overseeing 6,100 connected devices to 30,000 over the course of a decade. Looking at the possibility of coping with upward of 100,000 connected devices in just five years, the hospital turned to a robust, multisolution network management setup to help it create a resilient environment and turn insight into action with end-to-end visibility.
Focusing on centralized network management, the hospital is now able to make actionable insights. That has led to both greater engagement of patients and smarter operations in its clinical and research settings. The setup also enables CHLA to eliminate roadblocks created by lingering audit concerns and provides ubiquitous control in the event of a security incident.
What's more, it helps the provider organization to reduce costs related to the execution of tasks such as device provisioning, and has vastly lowered the organization's issue resolution costs.
