NSW Health has gone live with a statewide Wireless Core capability in a number of its agencies and is now rolling it out to local health districts (LHDs) and specialty health networks, part of a long-term plan to enable mobility, allow for secure Wi-Fi roaming across the state and to prepare the system for integrated medical devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Once fully deployed, the Wireless Core will allow all 160,000 NSW Health staff to connect seamlessly to Wi-Fi. It will also support the expansion of telehealth, including the state telestroke service, as well as extending the implementation of the My Food Choice system, which means food service assistants can use tablet devices rather than the old paper system to order patients' menu choices just hours before they are delivered.
Along with the Aruba ClearPass platform for authentication, profiling and network access control, some of the key elements of the platform are the state's existing Wi-Fi networks, statewide Active Directory and the Health Wide Area Network (HWAN). The latter has been rolled out to all rural and regional LHDs and is currently being implemented across metropolitan areas.
