If your staff complain that tablets lose their connection in room 114 or the charting laptop freezes at the end of the east hall, you probably have a Wi-Fi coverage problem. Care facilities are hard environments for wireless. Long corridors, fire doors, brick or block walls, kitchens, oxygen and medical equipment, and rooms full of residents' own devices all work against a clean signal.
Before you buy more access points, you need to understand what you have. Here is a practical way to survey your own building and plan improvements.
Offices are generally open and uniform. Nursing and assisted-living buildings are not:
Resident rooms have doors that stay closed for privacy, and bathrooms with tile and plumbing between you and the hall
Fire-rated walls and doors are built to resist fire and tend to block radio signals too
Residents bring their own tablets, TVs, smart speakers and phones, adding many devices to the network
Staff rely on mobile devices and computers on wheels during critical tasks, so a dropped connection affects care
Medical and monitoring equipment, such as wander-management systems and nurse call, may share spaces and sometimes the network
Before any measurement, collect the problems your staff already report. Ask charge nurses on each shift where the connection drops and what they were doing. Mark those on a floor plan. Patterns, such as problems that cluster at shift change or during medication pass, point to capacity, while problems in specific rooms point to coverage.
A walk-through with a phone app gives a rough idea. A professional wireless site survey gives much better data. Either way, test:
Signal strength in every resident room, with the door closed, and in common areas, therapy, dining, the kitchen and outdoor patios if staff use them
Speed and delay while moving, not just at a single spot, because roaming between access points is where many problems appear
Both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, and 6 GHz if you have newer equipment
Interference from neighboring networks, microwaves, and other devices
Aim for solid signal in every place a staff member might use a device, not just in hallways.
Where are they mounted? Access points in hallway ceilings often serve the hall well but poorly reach inside rooms. In some buildings, placing access points inside rooms or in alternating rooms gives better coverage.
How old are they? Equipment that is many years old may not support newer standards, handle many devices well or receive security updates.
Are they managed from a central controller or cloud dashboard? Central management makes it easier to see problems and push security updates.
Are channel and power settings tuned, or left at default? Too many access points on high power can cause interference with each other.
Whatever you do about coverage, do not put everything on one network. At a minimum, separate:
Staff and clinical devices
Medical and building systems, such as nurse call, cameras and door controls
Resident and guest Wi-Fi, which should have no access to internal systems
This protects resident data if a guest's phone is infected and makes performance problems easier to isolate. It is also a basic HIPAA Security Rule safeguard in practice, supporting access control and transmission security.
A strong signal does not guarantee good performance. Count the devices that will connect at peak times, including residents' personal devices and streaming TVs, and make sure your design handles them. Consider limiting bandwidth for resident Wi-Fi so entertainment traffic does not slow clinical work, and consider quality-of-service rules that prioritize your EHR traffic.
Wi-Fi is only as good as what is behind it. Older switches, long cable runs, or an overloaded internet connection can all look like a Wi-Fi problem. Confirm that your access points have sufficient power over Ethernet, that uplinks are fast enough and that your internet service can carry the load.
Collect staff complaints and mark them on a floor plan
Test signal and speed in every room type with doors closed
Test roaming along common staff routes
Review access point age, placement and management
Confirm network segmentation
Estimate peak device counts
Check switches, cabling and internet capacity
A proper survey takes some tools and experience, and a poor design can be expensive to fix. UnityCare IT designs and troubleshoots wireless networks for care facilities and clinics across Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, and we are glad to walk your building with you and recommend changes sized to your budget.
Call or text: 405-285-3845
New customers: start@unitycareit.com
Existing customers: support@unitycareit.com
Address: UnityCare Technologies, 2524 N Broadway Ste 554, PMB 947974, Edmond, Oklahoma 73034-4172