3 Tips for Deploying A HIPAA-Compliant Wi-Fi Network

by Leave a Comment

3 Tips for Deploying A HIPPA-Compliant Wi-Fi Network

On January 1, 2014, a key provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 went into  effect, requiring healthcare providers across the country to adopt and demonstrate “meaningful use” of electronic medical records (EMR) in order to maintain their existing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement levels. Many healthcare providers are finding that adopting wireless mobile solutions are a must-have to more accessible and updated EMRs and streamlined workflow processes.

The decision to go mobile, however, brings new challenges, ranging from selecting the appropriate form factor to ensuring mobile devices and wireless communication are secured from unauthorized users. 

Motion Computing’s new whitepaper, The Smart Way for Healthcare Organizations To Go Mobile highlights the best practices for selecting mobile devices and building wireless infrastructures that ensure HIPAA-compliance while enabling EMR and increasing productivity.

The paper identified three tips to keep in mind before deploying a HIPAA-Compliant Wi-Fi network in a hospital:

1. The Physical Building 

Even though this is the most obvious area of the three, it’s also the most challenging. When conducting a wireless survey, it’s important to call out wireless inhibitors within the facility, which may include materials such as brick, block, and wireless mesh. In addition to conducting a general site survey, extra attention should be given to specialty care areas within a medical care facility such as radiology, oncology, Bio medical areas, operating rooms, autoclaves, and labs which use equipment that can be very disruptive to some Wi-Fi signals
2. End Users
Without proper forethought and planning, one or more groups of key stakeholders will most likely be overlooked during the wireless infrastructure planning process. In a hospital setting, for example, in addition to the doctors and nurses that regularly work on a specific floor and in a particular area of a hospital, other clinical staff such as visiting physicians, specialty care, pharmacy, and hospice should be accounted for. Additionally, non-clinical staff such as security personnel, dietary staff, IT, administration, volunteers, and facilities personnel may need access to the network to better perform their jobs. Proper bandwidth and security measures need to be put into place for these workers. And finally, patients and guests are an important part of the hospital ecosystem that should be accounted for too
3. Determine Access Priorities 
With careful wireless network planning, healthcare providers can gain a better sense of how much bandwidth is necessary to support their mobile user ecosystem. However, due to the widely varying load on the network — both in terms of the number of physical users accessing the network at any given time plus the types of applications being accessed, it’s impossible to build a perfectly elastic network that never experiences bottlenecks. With that in mind, it’s important to add quality of service (QoS) capabilities to the wireless network design. Doing so will ensure that during heavy network use, the clinicians, whose use of the network is mission critical and directly affects patient care, can perform their job duties without network- and application-related delays or interruptions.

photo credit: Schill via cc

Tap Native

Get in-depth healthcare technology analysis and commentary delivered straight to your email weekly

Reader Interactions