Hospitals Turn to Intent-Based Networking Solutions and Other Tools to Manage Evolving Use of Conne…

Since 2013, the total number of patient visits has risen by 20,000 annually. Today, clinicians and staff at the 391-licensed-bed hospital and its multiple satellite clinics care for more than 500,000 inpatient, outpatient and emergency department visitors combined. CHLA is also a significant research entity, says CTO Troy Veilleux.

“Research requirements and needs for device use, data set management and data sharing are much different than for a hospital,” he says. “Researchers often press the envelope. It’s been a huge challenge at times for us to be responsive and effective.”

To facilitate those efforts, CHLA leverages upward of 30,000 connected devices every day, including barcode scanners, infusion pumps, heart rate monitors, medical imaging equipment and more. That’s nearly five times the roughly 6,100 connected devices it needed just 10 years earlier, and the total continues to grow daily.

“Medical devices, Windows workstations, laptops, iPads, cellphones — you name it, our connected environment is ever growing,” Veilleux says. “There are all sorts of devices coming in all the time.”

That continuous influx of new technologies combined with those items already on CHLA’s network has led the hospital’s IS department to rethink its approach to device management. Last year, the organization deployed Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access), which uses a controller architecture and intent-based networking to automate user access policy across an enterprise. It also implemented Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA), which presents an organization’s network on a single screen.