• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, a leading provider of communications, networking and cloud solutions tailored to customers’ industries, today announced that Aster DM Healthcare has deployed a converged wired-wireless LAN and Unified Communications solution from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise in its new Aster hospital in Sonapur, UAE. The implementation is in line with Aster DM Healthcare’s strategy to adopt a cloud-based approach and optimise IT spending across its multi-specialty hospitals. 

Aster DM Healthcare is one of the largest private healthcare service providers operating across the Middle East. With a strong focus on clinical excellence, Aster is one of the few entities in the region with a strong presence across primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary healthcare through its 25 hospitals, 117 clinics and 238 pharmacies in the UAE.

With IT playing a critical role in empowering healthcare professionals with access to the information needed to make crucial decisions, Aster is focusing on strengthening its IT infrastructure, in part with the implementation of a converged network infrastructure in its new multi-specialty hospital that includes a special 55-bed COVID-19 treatment facility.

“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,” says Dr. Sherbaz Bichu, CEO, Aster Hospitals – UAE. “We are already familiar with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise solutions and services, since we use them in other facilities across the UAE, and we appreciate the level of engagement and exceptional post-deployment support we receive. Our new special 55-bed COVID-19 treatment facility was made operational in record time, which is impressive.”

At the heart of this converged network infrastructure is the Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista® 2500 Network Management System (NMS), which is tailored to provide Aster’s IT team with a single-pane-of-glass management platform. It also delivers the ability to monitor network traffic and critical functions and manage the end-to-end network from a web-based user interface.

“All IoT healthcare facility devices are connected centrally and data is seamlessly integrated with the hospital’s information system to form a central data repository for data processing and management. This makes the data access and retrieval efficient, which in turn results in our doctors being able to access patient records, conduct procedures and deliver holistic management and treatment in a timely manner, thereby improving the quality of patient care we provide at Aster,” adds Dr. Sherbaz.

With Wi-Fi as a key component of the deployment, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provided a controller-less Wi-Fi architecture enabling better performance, high availability and scalability across the Aster hospital, while reducing complexity and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). The high-speed Wi-Fi supports finely tuned quality of service (QoS) parameters 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. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise also provides 24/7 maintenance support and a lifetime hardware warranty, thus minimising the TCO.

“Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has proven its expertise in providing healthcare facilities with converged infrastructure solutions that help ensure high quality patient care. We aligned with Aster’s expectations and provided a simplified, efficient and secure communications and network infrastructure to allow healthcare professionals to better collaborate and spend more time with the people who matter most – their patients,” explains Rahul Sharma, Sales Director – UAE & Oman, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “Along with our partners, the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise team led all five phases of the implementation and ensured no downtime, allowing business operations to operate continuously.”

In addition to this project, Aster and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise are collaborating on a pilot program testing Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Rainbow™, the company’s UCaaS platform, at Aster UAE facilities. The platform is already delivering impressive benefits by connecting 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.