Aster selects Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for networking, UC, at new Dubai hospital

Aster DM Healthcare has picked Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to roll out a converged wired-wireless LAN and unified communications platform in its new Aster hospital in Dubai’s Sonapur.

One of the largest private healthcare service providers in the Middle East, Aster operates 25 hospitals, 117 clinics and 238 pharmacies in the UAE.

Tying together the network infrastructure is the Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 2500 Network Management System (NMS), which provides Aster’s IT team with a single-pane-of-glass management platform. It can also monitor network traffic and critical functions and manage the end-to-end network from a web-based user interface.

Dr. Sherbaz Bichu, the CEO of Aster Hospitals, UAE, explained that the hospital’s IoT devices are connected centrally and their data integrated with the hospital’s information system (HIS) to form a central data repository for data processing and management.

This simplifies data access and retrieval system, which in turn results in doctors being able to access patient records promptly.

“It is important for us to have a solid network foundation to support 24/7 operations across our healthcare facilities. Providing our staff with fast access to patient records, critical healthcare applications and the means to communicate securely and efficiently is one of our primary priorities,” said Dr. Bichu.

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With wifi as a key component of the deployment, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provided a controller-less wifi architecture that enables better performance while reducing complexity and lowering the total cost of ownership.

The wifi supports quality of service (QoS) parametres to differentiate and provide appropriate QoS for each application, thus allowing Aster to prioritise bandwidth to critical areas of the hospital, such as operating rooms and ICUs.

In addition to this project, Aster and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise are collaborating on a pilot programme testing Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Rainbow, the company’s UCaaS platform, at Aster UAE facilities.

The platform connects Aster’s facilities with remotely-based doctors who consult on critical cases in the ICUs and operating rooms. Rainbow connects various departments to provide a single platform for unified communications.