Brookdale Senior Living Implements Enterprisewide Wireless Networking Through Aerohive Networks

Do grandma and grandpa need more Wi-Fi?

Seniors are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups for personal technology enablement. Aerohive Networks, which offers solutions in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled networking, announced this week that Brookdale Senior Living, a large provider of senior housing and senior care, has implemented a large deployment of Aerohive's enterprise wireless networking solutions.

The goal is to enable higher levels of care with Wi-Fi and electronic medical records (EMR), and provide wireless Internet access to its residents.

Brookdale Senior Living is one of the largest providers of senior housing and senior care in the industry. The company has more than 645 assisted living and retirement communities in 35 U.S. states.

About 46,000 Brookdale associates serve nearly 60,000 residents in a variety of settings every day. The company's services include assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing, independent living and therapy services.

The company has recently begun to seek a provider to help it choose and implement a next-generation wireless LAN to reach its widely distributed facilities, to provide wireless access within those facilities and help the company realize the value of its other technology initiatives. It required a versatile WLAN to make electronic medical records applications more portable and also provide wireless access to Brookdale's guests and families.

The WLAN implementation would meet HIPAA-grade security requirements, and comply with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance standards for secure healthcare environments.

Enter Aerohive Networks won Brookdale's contract for 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.

“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.

Brookdale has purchased more than 1,000 Aerohive APs for about 55 of its assisted living sites, and plans to purchase about 6,000 Aerohive APs over the next five quarters. The company ultimately plans 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.