Non-stop wireless at Valley Children’s Hospital

Valley Children’s Hospital is a nonprofit, state-of-the-art, children’s hospital on a 50-acre campus in Madera, California, with a medical staff of more than 550 physicians. With 356 licensed beds, Valley Children’s Hospital is one of the largest hospitals of its type in the nation. One of the core values the hospital embraces is incorporating new ideas, technology and methods to improve the care and services it provides.

Internet of Everything has led to an explosion of wireless devices in the hospital from patient care to guest access. The following blog highlights how the IT Support and Technical Services staff enable the following business outcomes using best-in-class, highly available wireless technology from Cisco:

Deliver Emergency Health Records to emergency staff on hundreds of virtual desktops and tablets from the patient’s bedside.

Keep nurses connected to patients, doctors and staff via Cisco IP Phones and

Provide free internet access to patients, family members and friends

Highlights:

Location: Main campus Madera, California, with several remote sites from Modesto to Bakersfield

Access Points: 407 units of 802.11ac Wave 1 capable Access Point 3702i

Wireless LAN Controllers: 2 units of 5508 Series Controller deployed in a High Availability architecture

Clients:

Several hundred mobile workstations and tablets

Over 350 wireless Cisco IP Phones

Over 35,000 distinct devices in the network a month

Per Jason Haroldsen, one of the network engineers managing the wireless network at the hospital, “The principle reason for this upgrade was to increase wireless coverage, density and bandwidth to ensure that all of the services mentioned above work without issue. Our aging wireless infrastructure was simply unable to keep up with the demands of modern wireless enabled devices. An added benefit to our patients was the expansion of our guest wireless internet services over this new hardware. Limitations imposed by older systems made it difficult to support the sheer number of devices that connect out to the guest internet WLAN, which serves nearly 3,000 active connections daily and over 35,000 distinct devices a month.”

To find out more, watch these videos about 802.11ac or High Availability please reach out to a Cisco sales engineer in your neighborhood.

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