Managing the network environment for an Aged Care provider typically means you are managing a range of sites, including head offices and aged care sites. There’s a range of use cases and the network really matters to both staff and residents. Our Aged Care Managed Service for your network can help.
As a network administrator for an Aged Care provider, you’ll likely have a limited budget (and maybe staff), and have a distributed number of sites.
Wi-Fi is likely of high importance for staff, visitors and residents alike – and the network is overall used to provide critical building management functions.
Let’s take a look at the use cases of key importance for an Aged Care provider – and then how our Aged Care Managed Service offering can help.
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Aged Care Network Management Key Points
Typical Aged Care providers have anywhere from half a dozen to 50 or 100 sites – these can be spread .png?width=240&height=240&name=Aged%20Care%20wi-fi%20(Instagram).png)
right across Australia, making the role of a network admin difficult.
You won’t generally have ICT staff locally at most sites, although you’re probably able to liaise with the local building management staff.
In the event of an issue, you could be up for travel to get to the site – taking you away from the fundamental job of managing your network.
Here’s some key points of importance for Aged Care network management:
- Site Access: You’ve got lots of sites – across a wide area, but need to support these
- Network is Critical: The network is used to keep track of many things in the aged care environment, so it needs to be highly available.
- Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi has become critically important. The residents want good Wi-Fi to keep in touch with
relatives, and you now have smart TVs in every room. Some residents are able to subscribe to a premium Wi-Fi product with lower latency and higher throughputs - Building Management: You may well be connecting building management into the network now – cameras, swipe cards and monitoring systems.
- New Use Cases: The aged care sector is evolving and new use cases mean the network needs to evolve. These are typically things like connecting clinical systems to the network, location tracking of staff for duress or call assist, Wi-Fi voice and a range of other functions.
In the following sections, we’ll detail how our Aged Care managed service can help augment your internal team.
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Network Alarm Handling
We typically commence a managed service agreement by installing our monitoring system, so we can centrally track your network and alarm on any issues..png?width=240&height=240&name=The%20Importance%20of%20Networking%20in%20Aged%20Care%20(Instagram).png)
For some customers they don’t necessarily know all the networking equipment they have installed, so this can be an interesting process, commencing with a network discovery.
Once the monitoring is enabled, we have eyes and ears on your network and can start to derive some baselines from this point.
It’s interesting how many latent issues tend to come to the fore at this stage - there's some quick wins we can normally deploy.
At some our monitoring will also pick up issues and alerts – and here is where we really start to provide you value.
We can handle, triage and fault find these alerts, so you’re presented with a solution, not an issue.
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- Increasing AP Density
- Wi-Fi Surveys (Overview to the various types of RF Surveys)
- Wi-Fi Phone Dropouts
- Wi-Fi Surveys
Aged Care Wi-Fi
We are experts at deploying Wi-Fi in aged care and with this typically being a critical service that really matters.
It is very common to hear reports of blackspots where the Wi-Fi is known not to work, or for it to be slow or drop out.
To kick off us working with you, we can fix that – this truly brings joy to the residents when for the first time they can do video calling on an iPad in their rooms and keep in touch with family. This in turn adds value to your business.
Aged Care Wi-Fi needs some monitoring to ensure it’s running properly – but also to add additional functions and features as you need – and we can help you roll out new sites too, if you need.
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Site Attendance
At some stage you’ll need to attend one of your sites. If you have small team and you have upwards of fifty or more sites, this can be a major stretch.
As part of our Aged Care managed service offering is the option of onsite hands and feet.
This is best explained with a scenario:
- You are running Meraki switching and you have a switch failure at one of your remote sites
- Our monitoring has picked this up and automatically opened a P1 ticket in our system
- We contact you to let you know what has happened, and the plan of action: we have opened a TAC case and ordered a new switch to be sent to site
- With the new switch details, we commission this in the cloud, to be identical to the failed switch
Our tech arrives on site and undertakes the physical install and the alerts are cleared.
This can all be done with the maximum of speed and minimum of inconvenience to you and your team.
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Aged Care Managed Services: Summary
Aged Care network management has a unique set of challenges. Budgets, staff constraints and a wide geographic spread of sites make this a challenging environment to remain on top of.
Our scheduled reporting gives you peace of mind and our alerting means we don’t miss any issues – often allowing us to pre-empt them.
With a reliance on the network for building functionality as well as staff and resident satisfaction, ensuring the switching and Wi-Fi operate properly is key – and we have the tools, skills and team to do that for you.
Typically we integrate with your existing team, not replace them. You’ll be in charge of your network, but we are there as an extension of your team, so we work in partnership – and often that’s the best way to get the job done!
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