Connecting medical devices to a hospital’s Wi-Fi network improves workflow on both the clinical and financial path. With networked devices, a hospital delivers better care to more patients while billing those patients, and their insurance companies, quickly and accurately. Networking medical devices also enables technicians to monitor and manage those devices from a central point of control. Hospitals will not rely on Wi-Fi unless they have confidence that Wi-Fi networks and devices will protect sensitive information that is transmitted over Wi-Fi or stored on networks that can be accessed through Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi Security Threats
Wi-Fi involves communication between radios that use a specific type of radio frequency (RF) technology to send data to each other over the air. In a hospital, Wi-Fi radios in computing devices( tablet computers, communicate with Wi-Fi radios in infrastructure devices such as access points (APs) that are connected to the hospital’s wired network. The radio waves that travel between the devices can reach waiting rooms and other public areas and even “bleed” through the walls of the hospital to parking lots and other nearby areas. Those RF signals can be viewed by any nearby computing device that is equipped with a commonly available software application called a Wi-Fi sniffer, which makes the contents of Wi-Fi packets viewable. Without proper Wi-Fi security in place, a hacker can use intercepted Wi-Fi packets to do one or more of the following:
- Gain access to the Wi-Fi network.
- View sensitive information that is transmitted over the air.
- Trick users into communicating with the hacker instead of the network.
To thwart a hacker, a hospital needs to use strong Wi-Fi security. But what type of security is strong enough? Read the rest of this entry »
CCX and Medical Devices
Hospitals and other healthcare providers rely on medical devices for patient care and patient safety. When a medical device is designed to connect to a wireless LAN, the Wi-Fi® radio in that device must provide a constant network connection. If the connection is not reliable, then the device will be seen as unreliable. Read the rest of this entry »
For several years, computers on wheels (CoWs) have been the de facto mobile computing device in many hospitals. According to a 2007 article, CoWs place computing power at the point of care, which facilitates adoption of healthcare information technology. Read the rest of this entry »
Wi-Fi involves over-the-air communications in two unlicensed frequency bands, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, that are available worldwide. 802.11b and 802.11g operate only in the 2.4 GHz band. 802.11a operates in the 5 GHz band while 802.11n can operate in both bands.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Wi-Fi Alliance positions Wi-Fi Direct as “a game-changing new technology enabling Wi-Fi devices to connect…to one another without joining a traditional home, office or hotspot network.” While Wi-Fi Direct has several benefits, especially for consumer devices, it may introduce unforeseen security threats when used in a hospital. Read the rest of this entry »
According to Alan Cohen, the director of systems engineering at Logic PD, Android is a good operating system (OS) choice for some medical devices. Cohen’s column in Medical Electronics Design states that Android “stacks up well against” traditional mainstream OS competitors such as Microsoft Windows Embedded CE and Linux. Read the rest of this entry »
802.11n is generating buzz because it offers a significant throughput boost. That’s important for hospital applications that move lots of data, such as imaging files. To gain the throughput benefits of 802.11n, however, you need 802.11n in both your infrastructure and on your client devices. Upgrading your infrastructure may be much easier than upgrading or replacing every Wi-Fi client device. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the new Summit4med blog! We’ll start off discussing the topics of our popular webinar series that wrapped up in November. Read the rest of this entry »