NHS Human Services, a behavioral healthcare provider, has announced that it has replaced its Cisco wireless network with one from Aruba Networks.
"Although we're a Cisco shop on the wired side, we just didn't have the confidence in their wireless infrastructure," NHS Human Services network manager Joe Trodden,. "We have a complex, hybrid environment and Aruba gave us the flexibility to pick and choose the right solution for each location, and then gave us the ability to connect and manage it all easily and cost-effectively."
NHS serves over 50,000 people with over 10,000 employees spread across 600 locations. It provides care for a number of mental health services, including autism, substance abuse, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and juvenile justice, among other things.
NHS’ technicians work in a variety of environments, ranging from hospitals to private homes.
With such a vast number of users to support, NHS needed more flexibility and performance than the Cisco wireless access points NHS was using could support. The ease of management is crucial to NHS, as it only has three network engineers to support all of its locations.
NHS worked with Corporate Networking Inc. (CNI), looking at solutions from Cisco/Meraki and Aerohive, but ultimately found that Aruba could support the company’s widely dispersed user base that was starting to use their own mobile devices as well as devices issued by the company.
The medical profession in particular has taken to tablets, as they let users look up and add data while walking around much more easily than they can with laptops, making them very attractive to doctors, nurses, and other clinicians. The adoption of tablets has also been spurred by provisions of the Affordable Care Act encouraging a move to electronic health records. Tablets are an ideal form factor for viewing and updating records because of their portability, but they need good networking infrastructure to be useful.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
