MOBILE EYE: WI-FI PERFORMANCE MONITORING IN HOSPITALS
BACKGROUND
The adoption of Workstations on Wheels (WoWs) and other shared devices in the NHS and has flourished in recent years, spurred on by electronic health records (EHRs) and a drive to ensure that the NHS is paper free at the point of care.
A paper-free NHS enables professionals to access information at the point of care in a secure, timely and reliable manner. This supports effective decision-making to improve patient outcomes and delivers high quality care.
However the biggest problem with all of these devices (especially ones that move) is ensuring consistent Wi-Fi performance 24/7. If the Wi-Fi is really slow, or has dead spots, everything falls apart and patient care and satisfaction is impacted.
Workstations on Wheels in Hospitals Demand Reliable Wi-Fi
The adoption of Workstations on Wheels in the NHS brings many benefits, but they are ultimately only as good as the Wi-Fi they depend on.
THE PROBLEM
Performance management systems have existed for wired networks for years and years, but historically WLAN performance management has been ad hoc with a variety of instruments and tools kept in drawers and on shelves. But wireless networks are dynamic systems with many components that must coexist harmoniously to achieve the goals of reliability and high performance.
Whilst WLAN access points can collect some data, they don’t collect enough in order to accurately diagnose Wi-Fi performance issues. And without the data, there is little hope for Wi-Fi optimization or long term Wi-Fi assurance. Handheld tools such as the Ekahau Sidekick are excellent at troubleshooting persistent issues, but a disparate network of geographically dispersed hospitals and clinics makes it difficult to tackle intermittent Wi-Fi problems that may impact workflows and patient care.
If WLAN teams are to become proactive they need to visualise and bring to life the wireless ecosystem. Therefore, a Wi-Fi performance management system is required that consists of three elements: active testing, passive testing and Wi-Fi analytics.
7 Wi-Fi Performance Challenges in Hospitals
Wi-Fi is essential to healthcare facilities, but persistent Wi-Fi problems make it difficult to achieve required service levels and realise a return on investment in the form of reduced costs and increased operational efficiency.
THE 7SIGNAL CONNECTED HOSPITAL
At a 7SIGNAL Connected Hospital patient satisfaction is high, medical errors are low and caregivers focus on patient outcomes, not connectivity.
Mobile Eye from 7SIGNAL is an independent wireless performance monitoring solution that provides a comprehensive system for continually monitoring the performance of Wi-Fi networks and wireless experiences across your entire estate. It proactively identifies issues and alerts you so that you can remediate performance issues before they adversely impact patient care.
Value Proposition for Hospitals
- Patient outcomes depend on patient information capture and delivery between physicians, nurses and other caregivers on treatments. 7SIGNAL continuously monitors the Wi-Fi network and medical devices and sends notifications before you get a helpdesk call.
- Disconnected devices cause patient safety issues. Going back to manual paper-based forms during outages or data corruption issues with enterprise devices can cause patient safety issues. Correct data is especially critical during care transitions where 80% of all serious medical errors occur. 7SIGNAL is installed on the client and acts as a continuously running utility to solve connection issues.
- Patient satisfaction and the correlation to connectivity. Each patient within a hospital has on average 3-6 devices attached to them. If it takes a nurse between 5-15 minutes to visit each patient and check all vital signs, he or she can visit about 4-12 patients per hour. What happens if the connection is lost? Connected devices save time, increase quality of care and increase patient satisfaction. 7Signal is the solution “Connected Hospitals” depend on for connectivity.
7SIGNAL: Hospital Testimonial
Workstations on Wheels, clinical IoT devices, and tablets all require reliable high-performance Wi-Fi networks in hospitals. This latest testimonial reveals how one 7SIGNAL hospital customer was able to use Sapphire Eye and Mobile Eye to identify and remediate Wi-Fi performance issues, elevating the Wi-Fi experience for patients, doctors, nurses, and all hospital clinicians.
HOW MOBILE EYE WORKS
Simply install the Mobile Eye agent onto your mobile devices (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS devices supported) and you’ll have an army of users reporting on the Wi-Fi experience everywhere they go – giving you global visibility of device performance and roaming behaviour.
Wi-Fi performance tests are discretely run at pre-defined intervals in the background, completely unnoticed by the user. Wi-Fi experience results are uploaded to the cloud where trending data and comparison analytics are available along with device data such as WLAN drivers and signal strength. Network teams responsible for a large number of sites finally have an easy and economical way to get real-time visibility of the Wi-Fi user experience at any remote location. Instantly identify individual buildings, floors, and devices out of compliance with service level targets for Wi-Fi performance. Then take proactive and corrective action before anyone ever notices or complains.
Key Features
- User experience data your WLAN vendor cannot provide
- ROI visibility into your IoT investments
- Client and AP agnostic
- System-wide WLAN visibility
- Determine if issues are wired, wireless or client device related in seconds
- Monitor Wi-Fi network performance in remote locations
- Export data to existing dashboards and applications to include wireless network details into current processes
- Collect 90-days of device connection history
Ask an Expert
Our experts are on hand to provide you with any knowledge or technical information that you require about our Wi-Fi solutions or Healthcare Wi-Fi as a whole.