By TerryAnn Fitzgerald
In the last blog, we tackled the challenges – and solutions – regarding electronic health records (EHR) in the data center. Now we’ll do the same for another critical component of the enterprise: the campus LAN.
To understand the obstacles you might face in deploying EHR in the campus LAN, let’s picture the various players you’ll encounter. Just as an example, let’s use a large city hospital. There, you’d find the main hospital with its various urgent care and residential care departments as well as physicians’ offices. You’d also have laboratories, billing, pharmacies and admissions.
Each of these players most likely has their own system for dealing with a patient’s medical information. Typically, these applications start up as skunkworks projects that ride on their own network. However, with EHR, you’re going to have to tie these systems together to share information. For instance, you’ll have to make it possible for a physician doing rounds in the hospital using his own office’s tablet PC to easily pull up the most recent MRI on his patient. In other words, you’ll have to take networks that have evolved organically and not only gain control, but also apply security and policy at the interconnects, or switches and routers.
In the past, you might have added a switch here or there to support these applications in a one-off fashion. You also probably relied on complex protocols such as Spanning Tree or Virtual Redundant Routing to tie switches together for higher availability and redundancy. The resource-intensive, real-time nature of EHR makes these protocols intolerable.
Instead, you’ll need a solution that lets you increase redundancy and easily scale your network as more and more campus players come online. You’ll need switches that can automatically “see” each other and fail over to one another in case of an outage or power cut. Your switching network must let you manage all switching resources as a virtual pool through a single console.
Important in this single-pane strategy is the ability to manage and secure your wired and wireless switching networks, including access points, as a unified whole. Think again about that doctor on rounds with a wireless device. You’ll need to automatically control his access as he roams the campus.
To properly oversee your wired and wireless LAN, your switches should be able to apply policy at the user and device levels. For instance, you won’t want someone to be able to hack into a patient monitoring device and use it to access sensitive patient data, and you won’t want users in the laboratory to see a patient’s CAT scan results. Finally, you don’t want non-essential traffic, such as patient access to the Internet, to hog all of the network bandwidth. Centralized management tools let you set and enforce role-based policies campus-wide.
Chances are your EHR efforts will become a campus-wide initiative. To accommodate this growing number of endpoints, your switches should support Gigabit Ethernet at the edge with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core and multiple 10GE, or higher, capacity in the core. In the not-too-distant future, you’ll see 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet links between the core and data center as well. A high-capacity switch will let you increase your speed without having to rip and replace your infrastructure.
At the same time as capacity is growing, space for these switches is getting more and more constrained. Therefore, you need a switching environment that can fit into already crowded wiring closets. The switches will have to generate less heat and consume less power – both standard requirements for today’s campus LAN.
As the demand for EHR increases, so will the number of switches and devices in your environment. But we’ll bet that your budget will not increase to add staff to manage those switches. To ensure that you don’t overtax your staff, your switches will have to be easy to deploy and administer.
You’ll want to be able to create a master image of a switch and automatically apply it to other switches as they come online so you don’t have to use up staff resources configuring and testing each piece of hardware. You’ll also need to be able to push out updates and patches from a central management console.
Lastly, your campus LAN switching environment will have to have embedded security, including 802.1X authentication and protocols that stop DHCP snooping and other damaging attacks.
With all of these requirements met, your campus LAN will be ready to handle the incredible challenge of deploying and managing EHR.
In the next blog, we’ll dig into how EHR will impact the branch office and mobile/remote workers.
Tags: Campus LAN, EHRs
