One of the most effective ways to keep a population healthy is to provide convenient places for people to receive care. We are all used to the large hospital with emergency rooms, intensive care units, labor and delivery, and other specialties all housed in one building or campus. Large hospitals can be inconvenient to get to, difficult to navigate, and generally consume a lot of time for routine health procedures such as a flu shot.
That is why over the past several years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of urgent care centers and retail health clinics. These are small operations, typically managed by a small staff who provide many routine services at reasonable costs. They solve a lot of issues around cost, convenience, and time savings for many people.
Just imagine that you need to get a flu shot for the season. Do you want to go to a large hospital, find a parking space, walk into the front door, and wait in a long line to get a shot that takes only a few minutes? Or would you rather quickly jump into a small clinic right next to where you go grocery shopping where there is no line, no confusing hallways, and you only have to park once for all of your errands? With the retail clinic, the flu shot becomes a simple errand, not an ordeal – and the patient is healthier, and the population, in general, is healthier.
Simplifying Connectivity for Retail Health
The challenging part is connecting everything. Every healthcare provider, small or large, is required to use an electronic healthcare record (EHR) in many parts of the world. Increasingly, the equipment used to help provide care, like heart rate monitors, is connected. Small urgent care facilities and clinics need to be connected to greater healthcare system networks, but dedicated network circuits can be expensive, there often is little real estate for all the networking equipment closets, and there is very rarely IT staff to support the operation onsite.
The solution is Aruba’s Software-Defined Branch. Aruba’s SD-Branch solution integrates new Aruba Branch Gateways with an enhanced Aruba Central cloud management platform to provide a single point for SD-WAN, wired and wireless networking, and policy enforcement to deliver secure, simplified branch connectivity at scale. Aruba SD-Branch is a purpose-built, unified solution that marks a significant advancement beyond pure-play SD-WAN offerings by providing reduced device footprint, streamlined deployment of large-scale distributed installations, and lower WAN connectivity costs for branch customers.
This means that the smaller clinics and urgent care centers can cost-effectively provide an equal level of care with the same access to medical records and equipment – improving the health and experience of both patients and staff. Everyone is healthier!
Learn more about Aruba SD-Branch solutions.
Rick Reid is senior products and solutions marketing manager for healthcare at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.