Assisted Living And Retirement Community Delivers Superior Care With Wi-Fi And EMR

Brookdale Senior Living is the largest provider of senior housing and senior care in the industry with more than 645 assisted living and retirement communities in 35 states across the nation. Each day, about 46,000 Brookdale associates serve nearly 60,000 residents in a variety of settings. The company’s services include assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, independent living and therapy services.

The senior living and senior care provider is always looking to state-of-the-art technology to increase the productivity of its staff, continually improve the quality of patient care, and provide wireless access to its clients and their families.

But like many senior living organizations, Brookdale Senior Living has a limited engineering team. These constraints are challenging, but Brookdale nevertheless recognized that it needed a next-generation wireless LAN to reach its far-flung facilities, to provide wireless access within those facilities, and to help the company realize the value of its other technology initiatives.

The Challenge

Healthcare facilities spread all over the country often pose challenging environments for WLANs, and those operated by Brookdale Senior Living were no exception. The Brookdale communities range from a site with 20 beds, up to sites with 800 beds. After evaluating the situation, Chris Fadrowski, Senior Director of IT Infrastructure for Brookdale Senior Living, said there were several main drivers for Brookdale’s wireless-upgrade project. One main driver is to be better positioned to provide a higher level of care and accuracy, and a big part of that is a need for electronic medical records applications (EMR) to be portable.

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