Hospital Wireless Network Updates: What Costs Can You Expect?

The health of your hospital’s patients is, in some ways, tied to the health of your wireless network. When poor network performance gets in the way of providing the kind of exceptional care your organization is expected to deliver, it’s time to make the appropriate improvements and upgrades.

Of course, the first obstacle in this process is often budget, and the question at the tip of your tongue is likely to be: How much is this going to cost? To get a better idea of what you should be factoring into your investment, take a look at the following expenditures that are likely to be part of your hospital’s wireless network update.

Network Assessment

Your first (and arguably most important) expense should be that of a network assessment to identify existing wireless problems and arrive at the most effective solutions. You’re going to need a very thorough examination of your hospital’s current wireless network, complete with a report of all the prognoses and diagnoses to optimize performance. A network assessment enables you to accomplish the following:

• Identify the best settings and configuration to make your Wi-Fi perform optimally.
• Pinpoint areas of highly concentrated users that make the network perform poorly in those settings (even when it’s performing just fine everywhere else).
• Determine whether adding more bandwidth or access points may be necessary.
• Figure out if newer devices trying to access your network aren’t high-powered enough to get a signal back to the wireless access points.
• Uncover what’s causing lag times and poor service, and get recommendations to overcome these challenges in the interest of increased efficiency and better patient care.
• Identify potential bottlenecks on the wired network that may be impacting wireless performance.

These benefits are invaluable to making the most of your investment in wireless network updates. That is why the network assessment is a critical first step.

New Devices and Equipment

Updating the network often necessitates updating the equipment, so this is an expense you should be prepared for. If your IT department is spending an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting device and equipment failures, it’s important to make the appropriate upgrades (which, in turn, will free up the staff to focus on more productive activities).

When it comes to making equipment upgrades, you can look at the effort in one of two ways:

• Wait until all of the networking hardware is old and out of date to replace it.
• Replace a portion of the oldest equipment on an annual basis so that nothing becomes too outdated before it’s replaced.
• Augment the trouble areas identified in the network assessment.

Which of these approaches you choose will depend on your current situation. If, for example, all of your equipment is suffering from critical failures, you probably won’t have the luxury of implementing a phased approach to replacement. Obviously, this will affect how much you should expect to spend on new devices and equipment.  Also, as new and faster standards are introduced, you may choose to implement the newer and faster access points in the locations identified during the network assessment as needing more bandwidth or having a higher density of users and devices.

Maintenance of a Guest Network

The fact that guests with smartphones, tablets and laptops are trying to access your hospital’s Wi-Fi may be causing some significant impediments across the network. It could be leading to insufficient performance and impacting mission-critical applications. That’s a big barrier to ensuring quality, efficiency and security in daily operations.

You can’t simply deny access to these guests, as doing so would diminish your level of patient service and jeopardize your competitive advantage. But you do need to ensure that the organization is complying with security regulations like HIPAA and providing reliable performance across the hospital. Patients may be allowing unsecure access without even knowing it.

Therefore, you must make a distinction between the central network and the guest network. A vital component of ensuring optimal bandwidth and meeting security standards is maintaining a guest network with controlled access measures.  Additionally, while it is important to accommodate your guests and patients, it may be necessary to limit the bandwidth on certain applications such as YouTube so as not to hinder medical critical applications.

Network Redesign

Poor design of your hospital’s wireless network negatively impacts staff members and patients. Your investment in network updates should include the cost of a strong network design to prevent the following setbacks:

• Compromised communication: Gaps in communication lead to costly errors and weakened patient care efforts. IT leadership must prevent these problems by enabling the type of network design that facilitates reliable, efficient communication throughout the hospital.
• Delayed response times: Delays in uploading and accessing patient information or carrying out administrative tasks impede staff members from doing their jobs efficiently and effectively. Fast load times and access to databases hinge on having a strong network design that keeps data technology functioning optimally.
• Decreased patient numbers: The longer it takes to treat and service each patient, the less patients your staff can attend to. If technologies and communication devices are running on a poorly designed wireless network, efficiency is sacrificed, thereby hampering your staff’s ability to treat sufficient numbers of patients.
• High stress levels: Improper network design can contribute to the stress of hospital staff. If they’re constantly running into technical issues and delays, this kind of stress may have a significant effect on patient care.
• Weakened security: When communication cannot be exchanged without compromising the security of patient information and hospital data, your organization is at risk of data breaches and HIPAA violations.

Addition of Staff to Your IT Department or Managed Services

To ensure that your hospital’s wireless network runs at peak performance, it may be necessary to hire new IT professionals. If your department is mired in reactive fixes and constantly responding to problems that arise, there aren’t enough resources focused on proactive network maintenance.

A reliable network requires the knowledge and experience to properly design, deploy, support, monitor and troubleshoot all aspects. Does your hospital have the manpower and budget to handle network design and deployment, manage network security, connect remote locations and proactively report and correct network issues, in addition to staying current on updates, patches, security threats and end-of-life/end-of-support? If not, your best option may be to invest in managed services that provide the functionality of a fully staffed IT department for a fixed monthly payment.

These are some of the most important costs you can expect to see when addressing updates to your hospital’s wireless network. Failure to prioritize any of these elements could result in faulty network performance that diminishes the quality of care and service your organization is equipped to deliver. So be sure to factor these components into your expense projections and make the smartest investment in your hospital’s wireless network.