Mobility Trends Impacting The Connected Hospital
By , Extreme Networks
The all-wireless, fully connected hospital, is a vision rooted in today’s reality. For many organizations, Wireless has already transitioned to become the primary connectivity medium. Clinicians, patients, and families rely on wireless – typically leveraging Wi-Fi – to heal, communicate, and for the latter to be entertained as an amenity.
What makes wireless in healthcare unique is the same thing that challenges it: complexity from its variety. In the connected hospital you will find machines communicating with machines, people communicating with people, and of course machines communicating with people. All of these real-time health communications occur in shared airspace, where airtime is restricted by physics of radio operation.
The air is where life and mission critical communications collide with patient critical communications – Paging, Voice, Telemetry, Imaging, EHR systems compete with Netflix and FaceTime for available bandwidth. We certainly don’t want anyone disappointed they couldn’t stream a new episode, or FaceTime to family/friends – yet we must keep the patient in the next bed healthy at the same time.
There is no doubt that consumption and proliferation of wireless will continue to grow exponentially. It suggests that organizations not prepared will find themselves falling further behind. Catching up will be no easy task.
As we entered 2016 there are mobility trends impacting every type of business including Healthcare. It’s worth taking the time to better understand these trends, and how they might impact your environment.
Top Five 2016 Mobility Trends:
- The rise of 5GHz
- Wide adoption of 802.11ac
- Wi-Fi calling
- Engagement and analytics
- Emergence of IoT
Below is a Slideshare that provides more insights on these trends, and how they relate to Healthcare IT. The presentation itself will be delivered at #HIMSS16 in Las Vegas on March 2nd at 1pm/local in the intelligent hospital pavilion.