With more than 645 assisted living and retirement communities in 35 states across the nation, Brookdale Senior Living is the largest provider of senior housing and senior care in the industry. Each day, about 46,000 Brookdale associates serve nearly 60,000 residents – it’s no small wonder the senior living and 
senior care provider is always looking to state-of-the-art technology to increase the productivity of its staff, continually improve the quality of patient care, and provide wireless access to its clients and their families.
With that forward thinking mindset, Brookdale came to the realization that it needed a next-generation wireless LAN to reach its far-flung facilities, to provide wireless access within those facilities, and to help the company realize the value of its other technology initiatives.
Of primary concern was to be better positioned to provide a higher level of care and accuracy, and a big part of that is a need for electronic medical records applications (EMR) to be portable.
The senior living facility also needed to meet growing demand to provide Internet access to Brookdale’s guests and their families.
In deploying an enterprise WLAN, Brookdale also needed to meet HIPAA-grade security requirements, as well as comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. Brookdale may also have the need for PCI compliancy in the future as the company does more point-of-sale transactions. Other requirements for the new WLAN included resiliency, reliability, and performance. It must also be easy to manage, minimizing the support impact on a limited engineering team. And finally, the price had to be right.
After evaluating three vendors, Brookdale chose Aerohive due to its cooperative control approach to delivering enterprise-class Wi-Fi, network management and security without the cost, performance, and availability issues associated with controller deployments.
Aerohive's controller-less WLAN architecture met all expectations, ranging from ease of installation to ease of management via Aerohive’s HiveManager Network Management solution.
Brookdale has purchased over a thousand Aerohive APs, but will have approximately 6,000 by the time the deployment is complete.
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We plan to deploy to all 645 communities over the next five quarters ... We’re probably going to be upwards of 6,000 in the end. Chris Fadrowski Senior Director of IT Infrastructure Brookdale Senior Living |
WLAN Network Challenges
- Needed a WLAN that offered resiliency, reliability, and performance and at the right price.
- Needed a wireless LAN architecture that would be easy to manage, minimizing the support impact on a limited engineering team.
- Needed a versatile WLAN to make electronic medical records applications portable and also provide wireless access to Brookdale’s guests and families.
- Needed a WLAN that would meet compliance standards for secure healthcare environments
Aerohive Wi-Fi Solution Benefits
- Chose Aerohive controller-less WLAN because its Access Points (Aerohive APs) running 802.11n technology required no network controllers.
- A single Aerohive HiveManager Network Management System NMS provides centralized configuration and monitoring and simplifies provisioning for system-wide policy management.
- Engineering team has so far purchased more than 1,000 Aerohive APs for about 55 sites.
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Brookdale has plans to purchase about 6,000 Aerohive APs over the next five quarters to deploy WLAN’s to all of its 645 community.
Read the complete case study here.
