New network upgrades provide more robust connectivity at Eastern State Hospital
As networking systems and infrastructure age, they become more susceptible to outages – which can lead to disruptions in services for entities, like hospitals, that rely on them.
Over the past year, University of Kentucky Information Technology Services (UK ITS) partnered with Eastern State Hospital leadership to implement several, multi-phased network upgrades that replaced wireless access points (APs), switches and firewalls with minimal service disruptions for hospital staff and patients. The goal of the upgrades — to make the network faster, more reliable and easier to manage and support.
For the project to be successful, UK ITS worked closely with the hospital’s leadership team to coordinate moving patients so that equipment could be removed and installed.
"It was a long process to do this because we had to coordinate to move the staff, clean the unit and then do our work," Technical Project Specialist Scott Sisler said. "After we installed the equipment in each unit, they would clean the unit again and move the staff back — it was a juggling process, but we were able to complete each unit in a week’s time."
That included replacing old wireless access points, which deliver wireless internet access throughout the building.
"The wireless access points that were in there, they were breaking, and so they weren't getting very good wireless coverage," Sisler said. "By us putting the new Cisco APs in, we were able to redesign that and make the coverage more robust than before."
The newly installed WiFi 6 wireless access points also provide substantially increased wireless capacity throughout the hospital, allowing for the onboarding of new safety systems and other wireless devices.
The project also included upgrading every switch stack in the hospital, which serves a vital function in the network infrastructure as they provide the data highways and interchanges of the network, allowing various systems to communicate and operate, Sisler explained.
Additionally, the project included the implementation of new next-generation firewalls.
"They're like police officers," Sisler said. "They monitor the traffic, they keep the bad traffic out, and they allow what we have told them to allow into the Eastern State network."
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