Real-time data sharing is becoming one of the new must-haves in modern medical facilities. If you're not looking ahead to cloud-based WiFi mobility options for your hospital or clinic, it might be time to start.
For best results, a data-rich environment also needs to be a mobile-friendly environment. By combining robust WiFi coverage with cloud-based data systems, the result benefits staff and patients alike.
1 - Improved patient tracking
Beds can now be monitored live, with vital stats recorded consistently and ready for retrieval whenever someone needs the data. Likewise, tablet-based software can make it far quicker and easier for Nurses and other staff to enter notes on their progress.
Doctors can even place bed-management requests online, such as new nutritional guidelines, and have it automatically alert the Nurse's Station.
2 - Better access to experts
Telemedicine is booming, with roughly 20% growth and climbing. This is due in large part to its ability to connect experts to experts, anywhere in the world. Overseas collaborations via videoconferencing are becoming increasingly common, and allowing patients to be saved when the specific expertise needed was on the other side of the world.
This can also go the other way: Those same video technologies are increasingly allowing rural populations to consult with hospitals, when they're hours away from major care centers. Rural clinics are increasingly partnering with hospitals via cloud technologies in exactly this way.
3 - Improved patient information and self-care
If your hospital implements a patient portal along with its Wi-Fi, this can be an excellent resource for helping your patients help themselves. All data from their records can be made available to them through securely-encrypted sites, allowing them to bring up their own X-Rays or test results without taking up staff time.
Many medical devices, such as wristband biomonitors, are becoming WiFi-aware as well, allowing patients to directly keep an eye on measurements vital to their disease or recovery.
Likewise, this makes home recovery easier as well. The patient's devices connect to your networks via their home network, and uploads the data for expert analysis. The patient portal can also be used as a direct link to communicate with hospital staff from home, saving further time.
4 - Go-anywhere access and messaging
The key to all of this is a robust WiFi network that gives your staff and patients seamless access to the network no matter where they go on-site. There's no need to hunt down Doctors, they can simply be found via their network connection. Likewise, patients with some measure of mobility can also be paged if they're needed for a session.
The time savings here can be simply enormous, just in having reliable instant communications, anywhere on-site. When those communications can just as easily carry vital patient data or video streams, it can turn your entire hospital complex into a single unified operating theater.
Everyone is in the loop.
Thanks to the rapid adoption of the Gigabit ready 802.11ac wireless access point standard, prices have come down significantly in just the last year or two. There are plenty of highly-affordable options from reliable brands like ADTRAN and Cisco, which combine top-grade hardware with user-friendly cloud software solutions.
Contact Hummingbird Networks today for more information on how to bring 21st Century unified data networks to your healthcare facility.