In Healthcare, the Smart OmniEdge Enables The Best Possible Patient Experience

Bob NilssonDirector, Vertical Solutions MarketingJune 19th 2018

Enabling the Best Possible Patient Experience with Smart OmniEdge for Healthcare

“Our hospital is growing to the point where the network has become difficult to manage. We have to provide the bandwidth and security for doctors to access clinical data and medical devices; and for patients and guests to view Netflix. Our small IT staff is struggling to manage and tune all the different requirements to insure optimal performance and complete security.” – IT director at a mid-size regional hospital

Digital transformation is radically raising hospital productivity and improving outcomes. Doctors and medical devices have become mobile. Patients now expect the full range of digital amenities and reliable Internet connectivity for their personal devices. But this mobility comes with the IT challenges of managing an increasingly complex and dynamic wireless environment, as well as preventing assaults on network security. At the same time, pressure to reduce healthcare cost has never been greater. IT staffs simply must do more with less resources. To address these healthcare challenges, Extreme Networks has launched the Smart OmniEdge.

The Smart OmniEdge Simplifies Healthcare Network Infrastructure

With an approach that is intelligent, adaptive, and secure, the Smart OmniEdge makes your healthcare network easier to manage. ExtremeAI applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize and autonomously tune the Wi-Fi characteristics based on learned history, events, users, devices, and the environment. This reduces the burden on your IT staff and insures that life-critical Wi-Fi will stay optimized in vital hospital spaces like the ER, OR, ICU, and LDRP, as well as in patient rooms, where high speed access to personal apps and entertainment is important to patient satisfaction.  

The Smart OmniEdge is adaptive and can be managed on-prem, from the cloud, or as a mixed hybrid solution. A new ExtremeCloud Appliance is part of this announcement. ExtremeCloud as a service provides an efficient way to extend the network infrastructure to remote healthcare facilities, such as outpatient centers, doctor’s offices, and even the iHome.

In addition to ExtremeCloud and ExtremeAI, the Smart OmniEdge introduces Extended Edge Switching, a more versatile managed infrastructure that seamlessly extends advanced network services to the edge. Extended Edge Switching provides a centralized, single point of control for reduced complexity and operational expense. Based on the 802.1BR standard, Extended Edge Switching is scalable to thousands of extended remote ports.

The security of Smart OmniEdge is enforced through policy-based network access control and application analytics. This is especially important with the rising number of devices on the healthcare network, growing deployment of IoT devices and sensors, increasing use of video, accelerating adaption of wearables, and a proliferation of BYOD devices for both doctors and patients. In the midst of this range of devices and network traffic, Smart OmniEdge insures that the privacy and security of patient data is completely protected.

Medical Device and IoT Security with Extreme Defender for IoT

Medical devices are both mobile and smart, which makes them targets for break-ins and security attacks. To make matters worse, often the operating systems of healthcare devices are not up to date with the latest security patches. Extreme Defender for IoT provides a simple, easy-to-manage solution to solve this and insure that devices are secure, even as they are moved about the hospital. It provides simple onboarding, centralized management, and visibility to pinpoint any anomalies. Once deployed, Surge needs no IT staff intervention, even as medical or IoT devices are relocated.

Location Services

Smart OmniEdge is compatible with ExtremeLocation and BLE beacons to help you track the location and flow of staff, visitors, and devices throughout the facility. This cloud-based service provides a highly-intuitive graphic view of location analytics and provides an API for integration with other healthcare applications and platforms.

Smart OmniEdge Addresses These Healthcare Networks Challenges:

  • Life-critical mobile connectivity with maximum security and protected data privacy
  • Secure BYOD for clinicians, patients, and guests, including a growing range of wearables on the network
  • Expanding use of Internet of Things
  • Protecting medical devices and instruments from security attacks and breaches, given that many devices have long life cycles and use older operating systems
  • The network is often geographically distributed, encompassing large healthcare facilities, remote doctor offices, outpatient centers, and telemedicine operations.

The Intelligent, Adaptive, and Secure Smart Hospital

The intelligence of ExtremeAI with its built-in machine learning capabilities, combined with the adaptive capabilities of ExtremeCloud and the security of policy-based network access control and application analytics, enables a healthcare network infrastructure that can easily manage higher performance video connectivity, medical devices and instrumentation, doctor and patient BYOD, and patient entertainment. The network embraces the growing adoption of in-hospital IoT with simplified onboarding and enhanced security.

For distributed medical campuses, Smart OmniEdge offers the option of combining cloud with on-premises network management to adapt easily to changing healthcare environments. To maximize hospital flexibility, the new management tools and applications, including ExtremeCloud and ExtremeAI, are available either as services or appliances.

 

Caption: ExtremeAI provides a dashboard that displays how it is optimizing the edge of your healthcare network.

For more about how the Smart OmniEdge can help improve healthcare outcomes, improve patient satisfaction, and extend your IT resources, visit these additional resources: