EMR push drives health care management company to go wireless

The federal government's requirements for hospitals and health care facilities to transition to electronic medical records has prompted health care management company Clear Choice Healthcare to swap out its Cisco equipment at nine skilled nursing and assisted living facilities throughout Florida and one SNF in Denver. To support the leap to EMRs and deliver broadband access to patients and staff, Clear Choice has replaced its Cisco gear with a ZoneFlex 802.11n Smart WLAN system from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Ruckus Wireless.

The health care management company has 1,250 employees across 10 locations, as well as corporate offices in Melbourne, Fla. With doctors and nurses now relying on mobile laptop carts to access EMR software and Web-based applications from any location across Clear Choice's facilities, having an always-on, far-reaching Wi-Fi signal is crucial. No easy task, given the number of medical devices and microwaves in use all the time, and thick firewalls in every other room.

Each facility has roughly 120 beds in 20,000 square feet of space.  To unwire these locations, Clear Choice purchased 42 ZoneFlex 7962 dual-band indoor 802.11n access points for its 10 facilities. IT director Kevin Neighbor will also use the Ruckus FlexMaster remote Wi-Fi management software from the corporate office as a single point of configuration, event and firmware management system.

The ZoneFlex WLAN systems are built with Ruckus' "dynamic beamforming," a technology touted for its ability to constantly form and direct Wi-Fi signals over the best performing signal path, continually steering signals around obstacles and interference that can degrade performance.