Case Study

Greater Boston Hospital System Upgrades Wireless Access Across Campuses

Lahey Health, a long-time customer of KTS, needed to improve wireless access throughout several of their facilities. They reached out to KTS to do the work.

The Work

A number of Lahey facilities north of Boston were struggling with poor wireless access. This poor access affected accessing and updating patient records. It also slowed down productivity and interfered with other communications among healthcare providers. Additionally, it was frustrating for patients and hospital visitors who relied on the network as a mainstay of their communication while at one of the facilities.

As wireless demand grows due to our increasingly paperless world, this is not uncommon in most workplaces.

To address the issue, Lahey had heat maps created to determine where coverage was lacking. The professionals at KTS used the heat maps in conjunction with building blueprints to determine where best to locate the wireless access points. They worked with the hospitals’ IT teams and made a plan for upgrading older access points (AP) that were becoming outdated, installing new ones and installing the cabling required to support them.

The multi-site project included five of the system’s hospitals and involved the installation and relocation of over 1,000 wireless access points.

Challenges

Working in a healthcare setting requires special protocols for the protection of patients. These protocols can add logistical challenges to scheduling and completing the work. Each hospital needed wireless access points throughout the entire facility.  Scheduling the work was coordinated with nurse managers in all areas of each hospital.

KTS needed to schedule some of the work when areas of the hospital were not in use. For example, operating rooms were worked on at night when no surgeries were scheduled following strict safety protocols required by the hospitals. Anywhere that night work was done, the work had to be completed before the patients and staff began arriving in the morning.

On the technical side, there was the challenge of replacing wireless access points on a live network. The network had to remain working as the installations /replacements were made. This meant coordinating the KTS installation schedules with the nurse managers, the facilities department and the IT team.

In addition, the IT team had to program the access points and new controllers so they were ready to work as they were being installed. A map of the installations was planned and that map was followed each day so that as an old access point was replaced with a new one, the old one was turned off and the new one turned on. There were many moving parts to the installation and they needed to be well coordinated in order to make the upgrade seamless for the staff, patients and guests at the hospitals.

Benefits/Impact

With the projects complete in all five hospitals, staff, patients and guests have reliable wireless coverage throughout all areas of each facility, allowing staff to access and update patient records making their work more productive and timely. Patients and guests are now able to communicate with ease, improving the overall experience.