This is part three of a three-part series on how mobility can enable better patient care. You can read part two or download the complete series as a PDF.

As healthcare organizations increasingly adopt mobile technologies, they face real challenges related to security, connectivity, and scalability. The addition of mobile devices to an organization’s technology infrastructure means increased vulnerabilities. Healthcare professionals need to make sure that their communications are secure and HIPPA Compliant, including when communicating externally. The underlying network that provides the connectivity backbone must also be secure.

There are also substantial concerns about how connectivity is managed between buildings on a healthcare campus, among different facilities in a regional or national healthcare network, and from individual clinicians and patients into the network. In some cases, healthcare organizations are hampered by geographic limitations and bandwidth constraints.

Scalability is another issue of special concern for healthcare organizations. As providers align with health networks and those networks consolidate to realize economies of scale, IT professionals must coordinate technology across multiple locations and add new locations to the core network. The sheer size of the data files involved requires a scalable network to handle the bandwidth requirements of today and tomorrow.

For healthcare organizations to overcome the challenges and realize the promise of mobile technologies, they need to take a hard look at the limitations of their internal legacy data networks and determine the viability of existing external networks keeping pace with growing bandwidth demand.

Many organizations find that their existing technology infrastructures aren’t optimized for handling and storing the vast amounts of data being generated from multiple applications and mobile devices. That’s why it’s imperative for organizations to adopt a unified, scalable and secure high-performance network that enables continuity of care across multiple locations.

Ethernet can be the engine that drives mobility by helping to improve productivity and collaboration. Its blend of sheer capacity and scalability make it ideal to support mission-critical applications for EHRs, PACS, remote diagnostics and other data-intensive mobile healthcare applications – including cloud-based applications.

Why Ethernet?

• Manages multiple types of traffic (data, video and voice) on one network, maximizing performance
• Scales quickly and easily across multiple locations so expanding network capacity is easy
• Mission critical data is secure as it travels over a private network to and from the data center/cloud provider – not the public Internet
• Can be more cost effective than T1s or other similar technologies