IT Planning in Hospital Planning!

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Read TG Hospital Planning Framework on slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/PankajGupta9/tgi-hospital-planning 
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Yesterday I had a meeting with a hospital planner who is planning the expansion of a super specialty Govt hospital in Delhi.

He wanted to get a consultant to plan the cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN for the hospital. I lost the battle of convincing him that - the cable/router/switch/LAN/WAN design depends on the hardware infrastructure requirements, that in turn depends on the medical devices and software application portfolio. In other words Hospital IT portfolio is extremely inter-dependent and it is self-defeating to plan the Hospital's cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN components in isolation.

He couldnt understand that the Lab, Radiology, Cath lab, Oncology, Laproscopic OT etc will need redundancy and additional capacity in terms of cables/routers/switches. We need to calculate the average and peak load for each Dept. and then design the cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN as per that. Whereas typical cable vendors dont know how to calculate transaction loads in Hospitals. For example bulk uploading of Lab results needs a network capacity that is far beyond the regular. LAN/WAN design will also depend on weather you want any wi-fi in wards and selected patient areas or whole hospital. 

Someone needs to decide if all the servers will will be located locally or in a remote data centre. Considering the performance issues, it is better to have the imaging servers located locally. Need to plan for a local server room and network cabinets on every floor because Smart hubs/switches/routers need a server room environment. Further someone needs to have a back-up and disaster recovery plan. The cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN design is dependent on many such considerations. It is never a cake walk as he assumed it to be!

The industry doesnt have any single vendor that has all the consultants in one team. The only way is to have a Healthcare-IT 'Principle Consultant' that can assemble a team of functional, software, hardware infrastructure and cabling consultants for planning the entire IT Roadmap for the Hospital.

I have seen some hospitals in GCC region [without taking names] that have very high adoption of IT systems by the end-users coupled with JCI Accreditation with minimal non-compliance. These are an indication of IT integrated into Hospital process and design.