Building the hospital of the future Aruba helps the Children's Hospital of Alabama in the United States transform its digital

Alabama Children's Hospital is a large children's hospital in the United States. It was once rated as one of the best pediatric medical centers in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. In order to further promote the digital transformation of medical services, Alabama Children's Hospital chose to cooperate with Aruba to deploy network services based on Aruba ESP (Edge Service Platform). With Aruba wireless, switching, management and security solutions, Alabama Children's Hospital will implement a number of key new functional upgrades to improve patient experience while simplifying operations and reducing costs.

[[429625]]
(Children's Alabama Medical Center)

Last year, Children's of Alabama provided care to children from all counties in Alabama, 42 other states in the U.S. and seven other countries, with more than 677,000 outpatient visits and more than 15,000 inpatient admissions. As one of the largest pediatric centers in the U.S., Children's Hospital has a 3 million square foot main campus and 14 teleclinics, and is the primary location for the University of Alabama at Birmingham's pediatric medicine, surgery, psychiatry, research and residency programs.

The children's hospital used to use network equipment from other manufacturers, but as the hospital began to improve the patient medical experience, it turned to electronic medical record supplier Epic to handle electronic medical records (EHR), and added telemedicine and video intensive care, poison prevention and control, and call center remote operations, as well as patient-oriented application positioning and tracking services. Such a complex digital upgrade made the IT team realize that the hospital needed to build a safer and more cost-effective network solution, and that the solution must be able to expand as demand increases. In addition, as more and more IoT, professional medical, and mobile devices are connected to the network, hospitals need targeted solutions to ensure device security and use data to speed up decision-making to provide patients with better treatment and services to adapt to the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic.

“Things are changing very quickly, and our existing network architecture really wasn’t keeping up,” said Bob Sarnecki, CIO at Children’s of Alabama. “We had Wi-Fi connectivity, but that didn’t translate into a truly reliable mobile experience for activities like video diagnostics, or secure connectivity for the approximately 100,000 IoT devices on the network, such as workstations, IV pumps, beds, and HVAC control systems.”

According to Sarnecki, the hospital's IT team has started an open architecture model to allow staff to bring their own devices, provided they can connect securely to the network, but the existing network architecture makes it increasingly difficult to manage these devices. Not only that, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded these issues, so the Children's Hospital must accelerate its efforts to provide medical services remotely. Sarnecki said: "Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are no longer limited to providing physical services and have greatly expanded the scope of virtual visits, so that patients can safely provide medical services anytime, anywhere, no matter when and where they need medical services."

Choose Aruba to build a new network

Faced with many challenges, Sarnecki and his team approached their partner Layer 3 Communications and eventually deployed an Aruba network. The Aruba Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points (APs), remote access points (RAPs), CX series switches, and ClearPass for wired and wireless network access control deployed by the hospital have helped the Children's Hospital of Alabama achieve unified operations, management, and secure network operations, reducing maintenance costs by 25-33% compared to the previous network. More importantly, the newly deployed Aruba network enables the implementation of a large number of medical applications and services, thereby helping the children's hospital to continuously improve the quality of medical services.

Sarnecki said: "In the modern healthcare environment, in order to effectively manage patients, we need to build a network that can support EHR transformation, device tracking, patient tracking, IoT, telemedicine, wayfinding, and future applications that we don't know yet." The Aruba network has become the core of the implementation of the Children's Hospital's telemedicine program and has become the only means of providing medical services during the epidemic. After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, the Children's Hospital immediately integrated Zoom into its scheduling application, began to send notifications to patients via text messages, and completed the integration of clinical systems in just three weeks. Currently, the Children's Hospital sees about 150 patients per day through telemedicine, and the Aruba network has become a crucial factor in promoting this service.

Aruba RAP helps remote workers work more efficiently

Aruba RAP has enabled many staff members at Children’s Hospital of Alabama to work remotely. Meanwhile, staff at the Children’s Poison Control Center, which serves all of Alabama, use Aruba RAP to connect their workstations, phones and headsets to the corporate network at home. Telephone triage, IT and administrative staff are also using RAP to work from home safely and efficiently, while the hospital’s heart clinic, 200 miles from the main campus, is also using RAP to connect physicians and staff to critical resources. Sarnecki noted that the Children’s Hospital hired multiple vendors for the EHR project, and previously they had to work on-site for two years and pay for housing and other related expenses, but now they can also work remotely with RAP support.

As Children’s Hospital continues to improve patient care, the IT team is evaluating additional Aruba solutions that will help it digitally transform its business. With location-capable Aruba APs already installed, the IT department is evaluating navigation applications that will help visitors and patients navigate to their destinations, allow for quick and easy patient check-in, and enable tracking of patients and equipment throughout the hospital. At the same time, the hospital is evaluating User Experience Insight to help it more easily identify and remediate network issues before they occur, ensuring the best user experience. Sarnecki is confident that with the new infrastructure, he and his team will be able to execute on their ambitious plans to continue to drive the medical center’s digital transformation. “With the Aruba network, we are building an infrastructure that supports the most advanced 21st century healthcare,” he said.