Background

Information and communications technology (ICT) is gradually being applied in hospitals worldwide and will definitely play a leading role in enhancing a hospital's ability to deliver modern, innovative services to patients. . Specifically, hospitals that use advanced network and digital technologies will be leaders in providing patient services such as archiving health records, transmitting x-rays across facilities, allowing for electronic billing and insurance claims processing and post-processing medical information. In addition, leading hospitals will improve care and increase healthcare worker efficiency through the use of advanced medical equipment and software systems

An increasing number of small- and medium-sized hospitals and local community clinics have begun providing more modern, patient-oriented medical services. This enhanced quality of service, will result in better quality of patient care and increased patient satisfaction.

Solution

Hospitals use an increasing number of ICT applications to advance their medical services, putting an array of medical network applications into clinical use. However, any network failure may result in serious consequences and directly impact patient care and the hospitals' business operations. To prevent network failure, hospitals must focus on enhancing its network’s availability and reliability. Huawei, backed by its advanced technologies and rich networking experience in the medical service industry, provides economical and highly-efficient network solution suites for small- and medium-sized hospitals. Huawei's network solutions are also cost effective and reduce the need for additional skilled technicians to manage and operate the network.

Medium-sized hospitals: Specific medical departments are scattered throughout the hospital. Each building is set up with an access layer and an aggregation layer. Aggregation switches placed in different buildings are connected to core switches located in the central building. This approach enables the network of medium-sized hospitals to contain three layers: the access layer, the aggregation layer, and the core layer. In addition to vertical hierarchy, this network has is highly scalable.

The following figure shows the architecture of a medium-sized hospital network.

Figure 1 Architecture of a medium-sized hospital network

Small-sized hospitals: Departments of small-sized hospitals are closely located in a small number of buildings within the hospital facilities. By constructing small-sized hospitals with a two-layer network, construction costs are reduced, networking complexity is minimized, and maintenance is simplified.

The following figure shows the architecture of a small-sized hospital network.

Figure 2 Architecture of small-sized hospital network

Benefits to Customers

High reliability

Network reliability is extremely important for hospitals. Huawei provides a very reliable, robust network solution through hardware and software features. Huawei’s access switches have 6 kV surge protection capability. The 6 kV surge protection device is 30 times more efficient than conventional 2 kV surge protection devices. Core switches use redundant control boards, power supplies, and fans in addition device backup and link redundancy is used on key nodes. Huawei switches support link aggregation, ISSU, VRRP, and Ethernet OAM.

High performance, easy expansion, simple maintenance

GE and 10GE interfaces implement line-speed forwarding. Core switches are equipped with unprecedented high-density 40x10GE interface cards. Access devices support the stack function and the core devices support the CSS function. These features combined result in a network that is easy to expand and has fewer nodes to manage, simplifying network maintenance.

High security

The One Net solution interoperates with third party NAC’s. Huawei devices perform authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) on access users according to pre-defined policies. They support 802.1x, portal, guest VLAN, and dynamic user access authentication.

Energy saving

The One Net solution is extremely power efficient. Box switches do not use fans for cooling. Chassis switches use multiple fans for cooling different areas in the chassis and adopt the fuzzy fan speed adjustment mode. All Huawei switches comply with IEEE802.11az, reducing power consumption by 30% compared with similar industry products out in the market.

Sustained evolution

All Huawei IP devices are built on Huawei’s proprietary software platform VRP, and are compatible with each other. Huawei devices also use chipsets that have been developed by Huawei. Huawei has made significant investments in development and advanced research around emerging network technologies and will continue to provide innovative solutions to our customers.

Why Huawei?

After 20-years of research and development, Huawei has become a leading information and communication solution provider. Huawei has professional R&D teams providing end-to-end solutions to its customers. Huawei has created global, regional, and national service teams to better serve clients in over 130+ countries. Huawei employs over 13,000 customer service specialists providing 24/7 technical support to customers.