Today’s clinics and hospitals are frequently experiencing interference with their current wireless connectivity systems, opening up an overabundance of connectivity challenges for healthcare environments. With the number of mission-critical medical devices in hospitals continuing to grow each year, it’s important that hospitals and other healthcare environments are equipped with reliable, secure connectivity to maintain the fluidity of operations. Additionally, these connectivity systems house sensitive patient data that must be secured, but also easily accessible for medical staff and caregivers at all times.
As the next generation of wireless connectivity, OnGo provides the necessary reliable, private wireless connectivity (4G today, 5G soon) at a lower cost than DAS systems and with the ease of Wi-Fi, using the 3.5 GHz CBRS band. OnGo is an ideal connectivity solution to support the healthcare industry in its digital transformation toward personalized healthcare. Its capabilities enable hospitals and other medical clinics to increase productivity and security by eliminating cellular connectivity dead spots that are often found throughout hospitals and enable new use cases that require high-quality connectivity.
OnGo allows hospitals and other facilities to use private wireless networks to enable medical staff, caregivers and administrators to increase the efficiency of operations.
- Sharing Data Securely – OnGo’s private wireless network ensures that medical staff and administrators can share important data, such as sensitive digitized medical files, in a more secure way than current Wi-Fi systems allow.
- High-quality Connectivity – OnGo’s ultra-low latency requirements support mobile-delivery of rich medical data sets (e.g. X-rays, MRI scans, CT scans) via computers or tablets throughout a hospital or clinic’s network. As a result, providers have remote access to complete information on a patient’s health toappropriately and quickly treat and prevent illnesses. Additionally, providers spend less time gathering information on the patient’s medical history, ultimately improving the overall patient experience.
- Asset Tracking – Hospital staff spend a significant amount of time trying to locate and track medical equipment throughout hospitals, resulting in the loss of valuable time that could otherwise be used to tend to patients. OnGo supports the monitoring and tracking of smart medical equipment — syringes, infusion pumps, ultrasound machines, ventilators, cabinets, beds or wheelchairs. This provides the medical staff visibility into where medical equipment is at all times and whether or not it is in use, enabling nurses to spend more time on patient care rather than locating equipment.
- Private Network Slicing – Segregating the private OnGo network into logical groups by function (e.g. doctors, nurses, and so on), or department (e.g. sales, human resources, maintenance), or any other logical grouping can help optimize use of a hospital’s network. By assigning each group to the network slice that is best suited to support that group’s needs, hospitals are able to prioritize specific traffic on the network (i.e. nurse call messaging, crash team calls, video)– ensuring optimum performance and quality of service.
- Network Access Control – The OnGo private network administrator can decide which network each device can attach to. For example, a maintenance worker’s device cannot access the medical staff’s network, ensuring patient data security. This provides the IT administrator with greater security control over network access. Additionally, devices do not need configuration or reconfiguration when the network changes, reducing staff frustration and connectivity issues.
- Active Standby – The OnGo private 4G network can be deployed with full redundancy capabilities, providing instant failover in the case of any system failures. This ensures there are no operational outages and provides 24/7, 365 connectivity.
With 5G on horizon, the healthcare industry is looking to leverage OnGo for future healthcare use cases such as immediate alerts from IoT sensors for elderly or rehabilitation care. Assisted living or rehabilitation facilities can leverage IoT sensor technology to ensure the safety of their more vulnerable or at-risk residents. For example, beds that detect movement, pressure pads on floors and gating sensors in shoes to detect falls and sensors to detect running water can send alerts to nurses or medical staff that a patient’s safety may be at risk. Other uses cases include rural telemedicine, robotic surgeries, sharing and accessing patient biometric data, ambulance drones and more!
Are you using OnGo for a healthcare use case? Submit your deployment for the inaugural OnGo Awards – open for entries now!
