Extreme and Novant Health recognized with the “Wi-Fi At Work” Award

Great Wi-Fi for a Great Cause

21 September 2021

What is better than deploying almost 20 Wi-Fi access points in one hour, allowing effortless cloud management and resilient, secure connectivity? Doing so to enable the administration of more than 2200 COVID-19 vaccines in a single day!

On February 13, Novant Health, a four-state integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient centers, and hospitals headquartered in North Carolina, USA, hosted a mass vaccination event at the Spectrum Center, home of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets. The goal? To administer an exceptional number of COVID-19 immunizations in the area.

Extreme Networks was all too happy to provide the cloud-managed Wi-Fi that enabled and supported the whole process.

The requirements

Novant Health required a strong and secure network to process and protect patient information. As you can imagine, due to the critical nature of the vaccine and handling a significant volume of patients each day, there was not a lot of time to plan…

Thanks to the simplicity of Extreme’s cloud-managed Wi-Fi solution consisting of ExtremeWireless products and ExtremeCloud IQ management platform, Novant was able to roll out access points (APs) mounted on rolling carts across the facility in under one hour, providing strong and secure connectivity throughout the site.

The wheeled carts could be plugged in anywhere, allowing them to be easily moved throughout the arena. The APs were connected to the existing Spectrum Center infrastructure via a virtual LAN, linking APs back to Novant Health’s cloud managed network.

The results

With Extreme’s ISO 27001 certified APs connected back to Novant Health’s electronic medical record system, healthcare staff were able to load and update patient records without latency, allowing them to process more than 2200 patients during a single mass vaccination event and vaccinate approximately 120 patients at a time. To give a comparison, a typical clinic administers approximately 500 vaccines per day.

The challenges of working through a pandemic are enormous, and the technology that supports healthcare workers should simplify complexity and reduce stress – especially Wi-Fi, which powers so many mission-critical healthcare applications and medical devices. In recognition of Novant’s and Extreme’s achievement, both organizations have been granted the “Wi-Fi At Work” Award by WifiForward – a coalition of companies, organizations, and public sector institutions working to keep communities connected over the internet.

Wi-Fi is a literal lifeline. So many organizations found creative ways to bring this lifeline to more people when they needed it most. These Wi-Fi At Work Awards recognize these remarkable organizations. On behalf of all our coalition members, we are pleased to honor this vital work to connect our communities.

Ellen Satterwhite, Spokesperson for WifiForward.

The pandemic has forced organizations to be flexible and get creative with technology. Extreme Networks’ cloud-managed solutions simplified what we were trying to accomplish and provided the security, flexibility, and seamless connectivity we needed to make the mass vaccination at the Spectrum Center possible.

Rob Hale, Senior Manager Technical Engineering, Novant Health