Redundant Communications for Health Practices
UPGRADING MEDICAL CLINIC CONNECTIVITY
Public and private companies across general and specialized medical fields operate rural and urban facilities that support and promote public health. These organizations have a dire need of secure and reliable internet connectivity to provide their invaluable services to patients in need of both routine and critical care.
Case Overview
IMPROVING PATIENT HEALTH OUTCOMES BY MINIMIZING DOWNTIME
An owner of a Dental Medicine Practice in North Carolina recently opened a new office in an under-served area of Buncombe County. After considering internet services and hardware for their new location, they decided it would be best to re-evaluate these systems across all practice locations. Some of their facilities were located in and around major metropolitan areas, while others, like the newer facility, were located in towns along the mountainous Blue Ridge Parkway. The owner explained their internet outages resulted in appointment cancellations, slower delivery of care, and decreased patient satisfaction.
Challenges Faced
RELIABLE HEALTH PRACTICE CONNECTIVITY
Many of his remote facilities only have one ISP available. Most urban locations have access to two or more ISP’s - enabling the use of a secondary hardline connection. While it was more common for his remote facilities to lose connectivity, even his urban facilities, with backup connectivity options, weren’t completely free of downtime.
- Lost Revenues - Internet outages were costing him revenue across several practice locations resulting from the need to cancel or rescheduled appointments and the long-term damage to patient retention.
- Quality of Care - Most importantly, outages forced his teams to deny care to patients in dire need. The owner, a doctor himself, felt he owed it to his patients to operate at as near to 100% uptime as physically possible. If his team can't access patient records or medical billing, they can't provide care.
- Reducing Hardship - The goal of 100% uptime is more important for his rural offices, with patients in typically lower income areas who regularly sacrifice wages and travel long distances just to make an appointment.
- Automatic Alerts - The owner also noted one of their facilities utilizing a dual ISP, had been paying for internet service that had been offline for six months. Without any automated alerts, nothing was in place to notify him or his team.
The owner heard that Cradlepoint Endpoints were high quality devices, read up on them, and was looking for a set of solutions that could utilize their devices. The solutions engineers at USAT got to work immediately evaluating options to present to the practice owner that would satisfy the needs of each and every facility he operated.
Solution Example #1
URBAN DENTAL OFFICES | ENTERPRISE BRANCH ROUTERS & OMNI-DIRECTIONAL ANTENNAS
When you have multiple practice locations, management becomes a much larger responsibility. The goal is to streamline as many aspects of their operations as possible. USAT's role in this process is to help medical organizations like his centralize the management of their communications infrastructure.
Healthcare practices spread across geographic regions may have different hardware needs, but they should all still be as uniform as possible to minimize issues with device care and management. Because of this, after evaluating this specific practices needs, we were able to develop solutions that fit the connectivity needs of each location.
For urban facilities, with a greater number of connected devices, staff members, and patient visits, we configured and installed variants of the Cradlepoint E3000 Enterprise Branch Router (CAT 18). This robust 5G capable router is capable of load balancing between primary and secondary ISP’s and dual-SIM cellular failover. Each of these routers is also capable of connecting with up to 256 separate WiFi-enabled devices.
With the Cradlepoint MC400-5G, your healthcare facility can experience 5G broadband speeds, giving your practice unsurpassed connectivity.
When it comes to ensuring consistent and reliable connectivity, we almost always advise external antennas that can considerably boost cellular signals. In urban environments its fairly common to have multiple cellular towers within a short range of each office location. Since there are signals available in multiple directions, we helped this particular owner select omni-directional antennas. Specifically, we were able to wire and install Poynting OMNI-600 antennas at most city based practice locations capable of 2x2 MIMO operation.
Solution Example #2
RURAL DENTAL OFFICES | BRANCH ROUTERS & HIGH-GAIN ANTENNAS
After consulting with the practice owner, he let us know that his more rural facilities had fewer patient bays, connected devices, team members and patients of record. They also let us know that the single ISP available in the area didn't have particularly fast internet options. Because of this, we recommended and installed a less robust, but still powerful set of Cradlepoint E300 Branch Routers (CAT 4 Variants) that corresponded perfectly with available networks and practice needs.
When it comes to remote and rural medical practices, having an external antenna to maximize connectivity is always a good idea. With only a single cell tower in range of many of his rural facilities, an omni-directional antenna wouldn't be as optimal a choice as it was with his city-based offices. Since there were only one or two cell towers, that were three or more miles away from each facility, we wired and installed high-gain directional antennas that could be pointed directly at the closest tower in range. In this case, and to standardize equipment as much as possible, we provided Poynting XPOL-2 antennas for his rural Dental clinics.
While both the Cradlepoint E300 and E3000 are capable of client and guest WiFi, they have very different capabilities as to the number of simultaneous connections they can handle. For the offices that had dozens of connected medical devices and computer systems, and hundreds of patients seen per day, the E3000 was the optimal choice. For smaller offices with only two or three patient bays, a handful of connected medical devices, the E300 was more their speed.
USAT was able to provide his organization with various cable assemblies and mounting kits to support their specific equipment needs location by location. To enable the WiFi usage pictured above, paddle antennas are included with the purchase of all E series Cradlepoint endpoints.
Stellar Results
RELIABLE CONNECTIVITY FOR MEDICAL OFFICES
Now each facility, no matter its location, will automatically connect to the strongest network available based on a specific set of parameters USAT helped them define.
With all their organizations gateways from a single provider, the owner and his team can now register, configure, update, and manage their devices remotely from their flagship office.
Additionally, they now have the ability to receive automatic device status updates that let them know what devices are connected and on which networks by using the NetCloud Branch software included with each device purchase.
Contact USAT
If you need WiFi or failover solutions for your private health practices quickly, USAT has equipment in stock and installation teams ready for immediate deployment across Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Colorado.
USAT has broadband, secure, WiFi hot-spots and high-powered antenna assemblies designed to function under harsh conditions and in remote areas. We offer top-tier equipment from providers like Cradlepoint, Poynting, and more.
For More Information:
- Give Us a Call: (919) 942-4214
- Send Us an Email: info@usatcorp.com
- Request a Consultant: Click Here
Featured Communications Equipment for Medical Branches
Similar Articles and Case Studies
Visitor Center WiFi
State park and tourism agencies are looking for solutions that provide free WiFi to visitors of their various information centers statewide.
5G Ready Banking
USAT is helping banks across America update their outdated 3G hardware with 5G ready branch routers and antenna assemblies.
Share this Post
