Hospital facilities requiring IT infrastructure investment
Video recording room, nursing station, and general affairs department
Recommended options include UPS redundancy and the use of the latest KVM.


Hospitals and medical institutions have been working hard to establish IT infrastructure to support the introduction, expansion, and utilization of electronic health records (EHRs). However, there are still hospital IT networks that are being overlooked.

On the 27th, Vertiv presented three hospital facilities that could benefit from increased investment in IT infrastructure, along with solutions for each.

“Hospitals typically prioritize industrial, high-capacity uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to ensure the availability of critical systems within their IT infrastructure,” said Angie McMillin, vice president of business planning at Vertiv. “In some areas, there is potential for problems to occur, and the impact could be on patients, not the hospital.”

The first hospital facility identified by Vertiv as requiring IT infrastructure investment is the imaging lab.

The medical scanning and imaging fields are experiencing the benefits of 4K technology, which captures even the finest details. However, it requires faster data transfer speeds and lower latency.

Legacy infrastructure equipment, such as KVM switches that allow easy access to numerous files and servers across multiple workstations, do not support today's high-resolution images or video.

Modern KVM switch equipment can support higher-resolution images. Doctors should be able to utilize high-resolution images and videos, similar to those used in the broadcasting industry.

The second is the nurse's station.

Many hospitals rely on UPS systems and generators to provide backup power for their entire facility. While this is theoretically sound, a failure of the central UPS system could disrupt routine operations throughout the hospital, and even emergency services.

Nursing offices are particularly vulnerable, relying heavily on IT systems for tasks like frequent updates of patient records, treatment management, and prescription scheduling.

Leveraging local UPS systems that support extended battery life can help ensure the availability of these critical IT systems by providing redundancy to the central UPS system.

Nursing offices often use remote desktops or KVM switches to access and manage data, but these devices become useless when the network connection is lost. For this reason, it's recommended to use a KVM switch that supports out-of-band (OOB) management capabilities.

OOB remote management is very important in hospitals. Today, when IT operations managers can perform routine tasks remotely with a simple serial console server without disrupting the critical patient care tasks of healthcare providers, system maintenance tasks often needlessly interrupt life-critical activities.

The third is the General Affairs Department.

In the medical office, there is a lot of back and forth between sensitive patient information and non-sensitive applications.

For example, if you're accessing a patient's medical records while also keeping an internet browser open to search for insurance information, without the proper equipment, you could expose yourself to vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a skilled hacker.

While secure switch products typically used in government applications ensure secure transitions between sensitive and non-sensitive platforms, they can open up new use cases in healthcare systems and other applications where privacy concerns arise.