Grey Bruce Health Services embraces digital first to ensure patient and visitor well-being

From slopes to glens, provider has everyone covered

From glittering ski slopes and cascading waterfalls along Lake Huron's Owen Sound, Ontario's neighboring Grey and Bruce counties host millions of visitors annually, as well as support a permanent resident population spread across thousands of square kilometers of stunning habitats.

Attending to the physical and mental well-being of residents and visitors falls to the Grey Bruce Health Services with its network of six hospitals, which offer a full range of specialty care ranging from cardiology and cancer treatments to complex surgeries and rehabilitation.

“During a typical year, our institution experiences approximately 400,000 hospital visits, which includes both residents and visitors,” says Liane Coates, IT Director for Grey Bruce Health Services. “Although our landscape is rural and tranquil, our hospitals are the opposite.”

Digital-first and going fully electronic

With patient expectations escalating, Grey Bruce embarked on a digital-first transformation throughout its enterprise. This included building a new state-of-the art hospital for one of its busiest satellite locations.

“Our strategic plan calls for becoming fully electronic to enhance care,” Coates says. “We also needed to improve our cybersecurity capabilities to enable adopting the IoT and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) connected solutions for automating manual nursing tasks.”

To do so, Grey Bruce needed to replace its aging wired and wireless networks. “By modernizing our wired and Wi-Fi infrastructure, we could mobilize our caregivers and support IoT and IoMT devices in multiple ways,” says Coates.

Wisely using taxpayer dollars

In collaboration with trusted partners Compugen and Mobia Technology Innovations, Grey Bruce evaluated leading wired and wireless providers, ultimately selecting an intelligent edge-to-core Edge Services Platform (ESP) solution from HPE Aruba Networking.

“Compared with the competing offering from Cisco, Aruba's solution was more robust and saved us 40 percent in total cost of ownership,” Coates says. “Both of these factors are important for making the best use of taxpayer funds.”

In addition, the Grey Bruce team was impressed with the engineering and technical support that HPE Aruba Networking offered throughout the engagement, starting with the evaluation phase.

“Our Aruba team was instrumental in helping ensure we could leverage all of the capabilities within a modern unified network, as well as assisting us with following industry best practices,” says Coates. “It was a real differentiator for our lean IT team.”

Enabling patient care improvements

Upon deploying its new wired and wireless infrastructure, Grey Bruce could begin various projects that are expected to improve patient care and reduce error risks. This includes using its ESP network as the foundation for mobilizing access to its Oracle Cerner electronic health record (EHR), which will permit automating multiple administrative processes.

“As virtually all modern medical equipment accesses our wired and Wi-Fi networks, we're now able to implement many connected devices,” Coates says. Equipment such as cardiac monitors, medication infusion pumps, and barcode scanners will all feed information directly into a patient's EHR.

“Using our network to support this type of information automation will help to eliminate the need for manual recording and data entry,” Coates continues. “This will enable our teams to focus on what matters most—patient care.”

Game-changing connected teaching manikin

Innovations made possible by Grey Bruce's new Wi-Fi range from the advanced Austco nurse call system to a new wireless Laerdal teaching manikin.

“The life size manikin is pregnant and fully interactive—speaking, expressing discomfort, bleeding, and more—enabling it to present the many situations that can arise, but in a safe environment for learning,” Coates says.

“We anticipate it'll be a game changer for helping teach clinicians how to treat patients in a hands-on, yet simulated, setting,” she adds.

Streaming video expands and enhances care

With its modernized and unified infrastructure Grey Bruce also has the necessary high-performance wired and Wi-Fi solutions to support expanding the clinical applications for streaming video. This includes peer-to-peer consultations between healthcare providers as well as virtual healthcare visits.

“Here as elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased comfort with giving and receiving video-enabled remote care, as well as physician-to-physician consultations," says Coates. "This is a tremendous long-term benefit for rural hospitals like ours.”

In addition, Grey Bruce can now provide more robust guest Wi-Fi access that enables patients and family members to stay in touch. "Whether a person resides in our area, or is one of the hundreds of thousands of visitors we treat annually, patient outcomes are dramatically improved when people can stay connected with their communities and loved ones.”

Powering connected devices today and tomorrow

The HPE Aruba Networking technology making it all possible starts with CX Switching for core, aggregation, and access networking. "The automation capabilities within the CX line and the ease of integrating it with our VMware VSX technology enabled us to get up and running quickly and smoothly,” Coates says.

Also, with the CX line's built-in Smart Rate technology, Grey Bruce can supply business users with all the bandwidth they need now and in future, without the expense of running new cable. "Plus, the ability to deliver up to 90 watts PoE (Power over Ethernet) ensures we can provide electricity to the escalating number of power-hungry connected devices, as well as our Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs)," says Coates.

Supporting EHRs for millions throughout Ontario

Grey Bruce also appreciates its CX switches for the redundancy engineered into the solution, resulting in significantly increased business resiliency.

“As we provide the network transport layer used by the Oracle Cerner EHR for six healthcare systems spread across Ontario, an outage in our network could impact everyone," explains Coates. "Although our previous wired network had poor failover capabilities, the redundancy in our CX switches provides seamless failover should an issue occur.”

To further boost network uptime, Grey Bruce has also adopted NetEdit, which automates and coordinates network switch configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

“Our team is excited about NetEdit," says Coates. "It will help us deploy new infrastructure faster, identify potential issues proactively, correct known problems more rapidly, and automate the application of firmware to ensure our network is always optimized.”

Adopting a Zero Trust cybersecurity approach

For built-in Zero Trust and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) cybersecurity, Grey Bruce implemented policy-based ClearPass to unify wired and wireless access management. "ClearPass was a differentiator during our evaluation phase," says Coates. "It's proven to be easy and very effective for our small team to use, enabling us to automatically grant access to staff, physicians, administrators, and guests based on the policies we define.”

Grey Bruce will gain further cybersecurity automation and efficiency capabilities by deploying Dynamic Segmentation. It works in combination with ClearPass and Grey Bruce's new infrastructure to assign every device to the proper switch port or wireless SSID on-the-fly, along with providing the appropriate levels of application access.

Another contributor to Grey Bruce's Zero-Trust approach is the Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF). It controls which services are permitted to connect at the network level, rather than forcing all traffic to route through edge firewalls, reducing security equipment investment and maintenance costs.

As the PEF has earned the Cyber Catalyst^SM designation, the technology also enables enterprises like Grey Bruce to apply for improved cyber insurance terms.

Objective data facilitates issue resolution

Up next for Grey Bruce is rolling out User Experience Insight (UXI) sensors at every location for AI-enabled real-time network health and performance monitoring from the perspective of users and devices. This permits uncovering network degradations before they impact experiences, as well as speeding trouble call investigations and resolution.

“Like most hospitals, we typically receive subjective reports from across our healthcare staff,” Coates says. “UXI will provide us with objective data on whether it's a network problem and, if so, what we need to fix it. If it's not a network issue, we can quickly refer the report to another team.”

UXI will be particularly beneficial for quickly resolving issues at Grey Bruce's remote rural sites, which are as much as a three hour round trip from the primary facility.

“Given our small team, it previously could take a significant amount of time before we sent a technician during good weather,” says Coates. “During bad weather, it was impossible. UXI will help us locate problems without any windshield time required.”

Trouble calls down nearly 100%

Standardizing on HPE Aruba Networking for wired and Wi-Fi has also netted other user experience and productivity rewards. "Our network support calls have dropped almost 100 percent since we migrated to our new wired and wireless,” Coates says.

For the Grey Bruce IT staff, the new infrastructure has enabled re-focusing from network administration to healthcare innovation.

“Our network is 25 percent larger than before, but it's so much more efficient to manage that we can easily do so with the same number of staff,” says Coates. “What took hours of configuration or troubleshooting time is now down to minutes, or less.”

More advances on the horizon

Looking ahead, Grey Bruce envisions expanding its networking infrastructure to include other advances, such as AI-powered Central, for comprehensive AIOps-enabled network troubleshooting and endpoint profiling capabilities.

“When we trialed Central at our temporary field hospital early in the pandemic, were impressed with its capabilities,” Coates says. “We're planning to investigate a full deployment as we expand our overall cloud footprint.”

To address the healthcare challenges around locating physical assets and improving patient workflows, Grey Bruce will consider using HPE Aruba Networking Location Services, including Beacons and Tags. “In addition to locating assets like infusion pumps and wheelchairs, we've also envisioned integrating location services with our EHR,” says Coates.

“This could have many advantages,” she adds. “From the basics, like directing patients to the appropriate clinical area for an appointment, to solving more complex challenges. For example, by tracking patient movement through various processes, such as during day surgery, location services can help us identify and clear bottlenecks for improved care and experiences.”

Better outcomes for all

No matter what the future holds, Grey Bruce is excited about the opportunities for enhancing care for area residents and short-stay visitors alike. “Our Aruba network allow us to move forward in ways we couldn't previously because it's stable, provides strong security, and eases IT burdens,” Coates says.

“In addition, the immediacy and high quality of the support we receive from Aruba has considerably increased our IT team's confidence that we can troubleshoot and resolve issues rapidly,” she adds. “We have confidence in our infrastructure, and our capability to manage it, which is critical in our fast-paced healthcare environment where seconds count.”