Whether you work in a pediatric consultation room, emergency room, hospital, nursing home, or outpatient service center. There is no doubt that connectivity is all important. Additionally, the growing demand for telehealth requires healthcare organizations to have an excellent connectivity infrastructure. There are a few different ways you can improve your healthcare facility's connectivity, such as updating your network cables and using wired networks as often as possible.
Updating network cables and wiring sounds easy, but you also need to make sure that the connections and cables are reliable and organized, respectively. The importance of reliable network cabling cannot be overstated, but why is network cabling so important? If your network goes down, your IT team should be able to quickly find the problem. But a mess of network cables won't help you spot the problem, and there's any chance that the cable will get stuck and cause more problems. So, what's the solution? Structured Cabling. Read on if you want to understand the importance of structured cabling in the hospital industry.
What is Structured Cabling?
Before discussing why structured cabling is so important, you should have a general understanding of what structured cabling is. Simply put, structured cabling is the connecting infrastructure of a building, which is connected by network cables from a designated telecommunications room or closet. The essential components of a structured cabling system include horizontal cabling, backbone cabling, entry facilities, and work areas.
Structured Cabling Reliability and Organization
In the hospital industry, you rely on reliable equipment to provide patients with state-of-the-art care—and the connectivity of your facility is no exception. Structured cabling will provide your building and employees with reliable connections throughout your daily operations. Because most nursing facilities use databases to store patient information rather than file cabinets, managers especially benefit from structured cabling. In addition, structured cabling provides improved bandwidth, allowing workers to access data throughout the building from any device within the local area network and outside.
Because structured cabling follows TIA/EIA standards, you can count on consistency, reliability, and organization throughout your plant. When it comes to networking, organization is more important than many people think. A cluttered server room can create some problems for your facility. When something goes wrong with your network, you'll want your IT team to fix it as quickly as possible. However, out-of-order network cabling can lead to extended downtime as it becomes harder to find the cable, switch, patch panel or router that is causing the problem. If there's one industry that can't afford network failures, it's hospitals, so you should consider structured cabling for sheer reliability and organizational benefits.
Structured Cabling Supports Facility Development
Hospitals have so many patients that they are often faced with the decision to populate or expand their facilities with new patient data. Structured cabling solutions are adaptable so you can easily make decisions about scaling your data. Adding new network cables, switches or work areas to a structured cabling setup is simple for any IT professional. If your institution does not have its own IT team, we recommend hiring us to handle the installation or expansion of structured cabling hardware. Otherwise, there is a very good chance of making a big mistake for anyone with no prior experience building networks and following standards.
Structured cabling contributes to better telemedicine capabilities
We found some changes in the hospital industry, most notably telemedicine. Structured cabling supports not only telemedicine but also on-site care. By using a high-quality cat5e cable or higher, you'll get a more reliable connection and faster transfer speeds. In addition to increasing speed, structured cabling will help everyone by providing better bandwidth.
Structured cabling can help you meet industry standards
There are many wiring standards in the hospital industry, the most important of which is ANSI/TIA-1179-A. While the ANSI/TIA-1179-A standard has several components, including topology, cable performance requirements, and safety, there are also some details to guide you through structured cabling requirements. By aligning your facility with industry standards, you can rest assured that our facility's infrastructure can support the latest technologies.
At the heart of every healthcare facility is improving the lives of patients, and structured cabling supports that. Structured cabling can help administrators find documents and patient information faster. As mentioned earlier, many institutions (especially hospitals) use a patient network monitoring system that connects to you. Network failures can lead to medical emergencies for patients, so to avoid downtime, you should always install a professional structured cabling system.
