Assisted Living and Retirement Community Leader Delivers Higher Levels of Care with Wi-Fi and Electronic Medical Records

Aerohive Chosen to Equip Large Distributed Healthcare Organization with Easily Managed and Secure Wi-Fi

Sunnyvale, Calif. —June 5, 2012 — Aerohive Networks, the pioneer in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled networking, today announced that Brookdale Senior Living, the largest provider of senior housing and senior care in the industry, has implemented a massive deployment of Aerohive’s enterprise wireless networking solutions to enable higher levels of care with Wi-Fi and EMR, and provide wireless Internet access to its residents.                                                        

News Facts 

  • Brookdale Senior Living is the largest provider of senior housing and senior care in the industry with more than 645 assisted living and retirement communities in 35 states across the nation. Each day, about 46,000 Brookdale associates serve nearly 60,000 residents in a variety of settings. The company’s services include assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, independent living and therapy services.
     
  • Despite limited engineering resources, Brookdale recognized that it needed a next-generation wireless LAN to reach its widely distributed facilities, to provide wireless access within those facilities, and to help the company realize the value of its other technology initiatives.
     
  • The organization required a versatile WLAN to make electronic medical records applications portable and also provide wireless access to Brookdale’s guests and families. They also needed a WLAN that would meet HIPAA-grade security requirements, as well as comply with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance standards for secure healthcare environments.
     
  • Brookdale was not satisfied with the controller-based limitations of its existing wireless solutions, deciding to pursue a corporate WLAN solution that would be more cost effective and easier to manage while providing a high level of availability.
     
  • The organization evaluated three vendors before deciding on Aerohive’s solutions due to their cooperative control approach to delivering enterprise-class Wi-Fi, network management and security without the cost, performance, and availability issues associated with controller deployments.
     
  • Brookdale has so far purchased more than 1,000 Aerohive APs for about 55 sites and plans to purchase about 6,000 Aerohive APs over the next five quarters to deploy WLAN’s to all of its 645 communities.
     
  • A single Aerohive HiveManager Network Management System (NMS) now provides centralized configuration and monitoring for Brookdale, and simplifies provisioning for system-wide policy management.
     
  • To read the full Brookdale Senior Living case study, please visit: http://www.aerohive.com/resources/brookdale-senior-living

Comments

“We’re finding mobility is key for our EMR applications. It gives us the ability to do bedside support and therapy in many locations, without having to be connected by a wire,” said Chris Fadrowski, Senior Director of IT Infrastructure for Brookdale Senior Living.

“We found that when we wanted to get into true enterprise wireless, we wanted to reduce costs by not having controllers in place. With a controller-based solution, to deliver the functionality we required we had to have a controller here in Milwaukee, where the data center resides, and a controller in every community, thus raising costs quite a bit, adding to single points of failure, and the necessity to build in more redundancy and more cost with controller-type systems,” said Fadrowski.

“When you’re looking at all the enterprise wireless networks out there, they all have a number of features that we need. Aerohive was selected from the perspective of having a no-controller setup. They were more innovative than the others,” said Fadrowski.

About Aerohive Networks

Aerohive Networks reduces the cost and complexity of today’s networks with cloud-enabled, distributed Wi-Fi and routing solutions for enterprises and medium sized companies including branch offices and teleworkers. Aerohive’s award-winning cooperative control Wi-Fi architecture, public or private cloud-enabled network management, routing and VPN solutions eliminate costly controllers and single points of failure. This gives its customers mission critical reliability with granular security and policy enforcement and the ability to start small and expand without limitations. Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital and New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA). For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100, follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog or become a fan on our Facebook page.

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