Network Administrators - Hospital

Hello all, I am wanting to hear from network administrators or IT professionals who work for a hospital or other medical facility. What I'm wanting to know is more about your job and if you like it. Details would be interesting. If you have time to chat about it you can drop me an email (mrfusion70@yahoo.com) or maybe we can get a chat going.
Thank you for any replys ahead of time!
JJ

 

I was an intern at a local (small) hospital for 6 weeks, and have heard about how things were setup at a much larger regional hospital.

At the local one, there were 2 full time staff people there, but once they had me to help with the workload, they just got a 3rd full time staff person there, nearly a year after I left. They maintained the servers and network and phone lines, ran backups, replaced computers, and were on call 24/7. The larger hospital has a much larger staff, with it being broken down into network support, hardware support, software support, etc. If you determined the issue was something outside of your area, you passed it on to the next area.

The smaller hospital got rid of the last remaining Windows 98 installations during my 6 weeks there. The larger hospital is most likely much more advanced, hardware/software-wise.

Let me know if you have any questions

 

Networking a Medical facility is not a simple affair, the main issue is not Networking per-se, but the security and privacy consideration.

Hospital Networking has to comply with specific rules.

it is impossible to do it right without using a consultant that his specialty is the mandate rules.

 

I did a few weeks at a hospital between jobs. It was ok, just like most other support/admin jobs. Helping administration with MS Office, trying to understand their in house registry / billing system that 3 programmers were there writing everyday. The dictation system that was remote for most of the users who would have connectivity issues, connecting misc. devices - blood meter etc. The 'hard' part was venturing out of the admin side to the actual hospital. It is weird to be troubleshooting wireless in an operating ER & hearing little a little kid crying. But the position was temp to perm supposedly but I found another position and couldn't hold out for them to decide to keep me (budget approval was some time off). They were in the middle of a big change over. The previous IT dept was a bunch of self taught buddies and they tried to strong arm the hospital and figured they had strength in numbers but didn't they all left or got canned. The hospital just hired an outside helpdesk to answer calls after 5pm and they sent one of their people there to manage the rebuilding of an IT staff.

 

Thanks for the replys. Hope to hear from more of you on this subject. I work for an ISP currently and we also have an outside source we use for security issues and management of our cisco routers. I would imagine that being one of the inside guys who do the hands on stuff (all the B.S.) would be an interesting job with good income possibilities. Job security would not be an issue either, especially if your good at your work. And think of all the hospitals around the world, job oppertunities would be everywhere.