In a move to boost staff productivity and improve patient care at its four health care facilities in Westchester County, N.Y., Riverside Health Care System is implementing a wireless LAN from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Aerohive Networks. The new wireless LAN has already been deployed at St. John's Riverside Hospital-Andrus Pavilion, where it supports a bedside documentation application and will soon support a variety of applications, including bedside registration, drug administration and verification, RFID patient tagging, and guest access.

This deployment posed unique challenges because St. Johns Riverside Hospital-Andrus Pavilion sits adjacent to both a 200-unit apartment complex and a 300-office medical park, each running numerous wireless networks that posed significant RF interference issues.

Although the Riverside team evaluated offerings from four other vendors, each featured a controller-based architecture that presented a potential single point of failure, decreasing resiliency. The most promising alternative was designed to have all clients on a single channel across the infrastructure, but that option that was ruled out because of the challenging RF environment.

Instead, Riverside officials say they opted for Aerohive's cooperative control wireless LAN based on its RF performance, as well as its ease of implementation and management, built-in security and mobility. The vendor's cooperative control networks are touted for being more reliable than controller-based networks because controllers' single points of failure are eliminated.

The health care system also favored its scalability and performance, lower TCO, and its ability to seamlessly upgrade to 802.11n equipment.