Hospital Connectivity Is Clinical Infrastructure

Modern hospitals are cyber-physical systems. In England, 94% of NHS acute trusts have an electronic patient record (EPR) in place, making digital access the default operating context for much of clinical care^[1]. Prescribing, medication administration, diagnostic retrieval, and real-time patient monitoring depend on networked infrastructure. When connectivity fails, care does not simply slow—it becomes less visible, less coordinated, and more difficult to deliver safely.

Yet many healthcare organisations continue to measure connectivity reliability in ways that obscure the actual clinical risk.

Traditional IT monitoring asks whether a system is up. Clinical reality requires a different measure: whether frontline staff can complete safety-critical workflows under operational conditions.

Infrastructure metrics measure whether systems are running. They don’t measure whether a ward can function—or whether the network will remain available when it matters most. Both gaps put patients at risk.

Research consistently demonstrates a significant gap between these two measures. Studies have found laboratory results delayed by an average of 62% during EPR downtime compared with normal operation^[2]. These delays do not always correspond to a complete system failure. Hospital networks can report healthy status while clinicians experience authentication failures, Wi-Fi degradation, interface backlogs, or latency that renders barcode medication scanning unreliable.

Some organisations have begun adopting ‘clinical canary’ metrics—measuring EPR login success rates, barcode scan completion, and result delivery times—to identify functional degradation before it cascades. These indicators measure what clinicians experience, rather than what infrastructure dashboards report.

The problem is most acute at the edges. A ward-level Wi-Fi fault may not trigger alerts at the Network Operations Centre (NOC), yet nursing staff will observe the impact immediately—queuing at the limited number of functioning workstations. Partial failures are frequently invisible to centralised monitoring but disruptive to those delivering care.

Independent localised incidents—a faulty access point, a misconfigured switch, a single hardware failure—are common and typically contained. The most severe events, however, share a different characteristic: correlation. When multiple departments or sites fail simultaneously due to shared dependencies, impact escalates rapidly.

The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident demonstrated the scale of this risk. A faulty software update distributed to enterprise cybersecurity systems caused simultaneous failures across 34% of surveyed US hospitals. Of the 1,098 affected network services identified, 239 were patient-facing—including EPR access, imaging systems, patient portals, and foetal monitoring^[3]. Most hospitals recovered within six hours, but 7.8% experienced outages exceeding 48 hours.

In the UK, the June 2024 Synnovis pathology incident illustrated how disruption at a single supplier can cascade across multiple NHS trusts. Synnovis reports that access to services available prior to the attack was restored by late autumn 2024^[4]. This pattern is not new—the 2017 WannaCry attack disrupted 34% of NHS trusts and resulted in over 19,000 cancelled appointments^[5]—but the increasing dependence on shared digital services has amplified the consequences.

Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report finds ransomware was present in 44% of breaches overall, and third-party involvement has doubled to 30%^[6].

Correlated failures require a fundamentally different approach to resilience. Path diversity, architectural segmentation, and tested alternative workflows are not optional enhancements—they are baseline requirements.

For clinical infrastructure, resilience is measured not by whether failures occur, but by how quickly they are detected, contained, and resolved. A resilient organisation demonstrates that when connectivity fails, critical care pathways continue under controlled procedures and normal operations restore quickly—with documented accountability and reduced likelihood of repeat failures.

This approach aligns with the PACE framework—Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency—a model used widely in emergency communications planning that establishes layered survivability rather than single-path dependence^[7]. Primary operations run on resilient infrastructure with monitored clinical Wi-Fi and redundant switching. Alternate paths provide carrier diversity and secondary wide area network (WAN) options. Contingency plans segment a minimum viable clinical network to preserve essential workflows. Emergency procedures maintain rehearsed downtime processes and manual safety checks.

The challenge is that many healthcare settings—virtual wards, hospital-at-home programmes, mobile clinical units, rural facilities, and temporary care environments—operate outside the controlled infrastructure of a main hospital campus. These distributed care models require resilience that extends to the point of care. With resilience expectations rising and the PSTN switch-off deadline in January 2027^[8], the timeframe for addressing these gaps is limited.

Measuring clinical workflows requires the underlying network to be available. The incidents described above—CrowdStrike, Synnovis, WannaCry—were not monitoring failures. They were availability failures: connectivity lost, degraded, or compromised at scale. Before organisations can measure whether wards are functioning, they must ensure the network paths remain operational and secure.

Implementing the PACE framework manually across hundreds of endpoints is operationally impractical. It requires automation built into the hardware itself—failover logic that operates without human intervention, path selection that responds to degradation in real time, and routing decisions that do not depend on NOC availability during an incident.

CSL Outpost provides hybrid multi-path connectivity for healthcare environments where fixed infrastructure is unavailable, insufficient, or requires additional resilience. The platform uses a quad-radio architecture with up to four independent 4G/5G modules—each on a separate network—delivering the PACE model in hardware:

• Primary: The first path carries traffic under normal conditions
• Alternate: Paths on different carriers activate automatically when degradation is detected
• Contingency: A fourth independent network or bonded satellite maintains essential connectivity
• Emergency: Managed failover eliminates the manual intervention that emergency procedures typically require

Additional links including fibre or other wireless connections can be bonded for further resilience.

For hospitals and clinical sites, Outpost delivers WAN resilience that maintains connectivity to clinical systems when primary links fail—whether due to fibre cuts, ISP outages, or provider-side incidents. For virtual ward deployments, it enables clinical monitoring to continue regardless of local broadband availability or mobile signal variability. For mobile clinical units and temporary facilities, it provides connectivity without dependence on permanent ISP installation. For rural healthcare settings with limited terrestrial coverage, it addresses gaps that would otherwise constrain service delivery.

Combined with private Access Point Names (APNs) and managed VPN endpoints, traffic remains isolated from public internet infrastructure—reducing exposure to the broad network-based attacks that have disrupted healthcare organisations. Private APNs route cellular traffic directly into trust networks without public internet breakout. VPN tunnels provide end-to-end encryption terminating at CSL-managed infrastructure. The result is connectivity that is not only resilient to physical and carrier failures, but also segregated from the attack surfaces exploited in incidents like WannaCry.

This architecture extends the PACE model across the full care pathway—from acute sites to community settings to patient homes. When a primary path degrades, failover to genuinely diverse alternates—including managed LEO satellite where appropriate—occurs without manual intervention. The result is connectivity that degrades in a controlled manner rather than failing without warning.

Hospital connectivity has become clinical infrastructure. Organisations that recognise this—and allocate resources accordingly—will be better positioned to manage disruption. Not because they have eliminated every failure mode, but because they have built systems capable of safe degradation and rapid recovery.

For healthcare organisations extending services beyond traditional hospital sites, the operational question has changed. It is no longer whether all failures can be prevented. It is whether failures can be detected early, contained effectively, and recovered from predictably.

To discuss how CSL can support your organisation’s connectivity resilience strategy, contact us at sales@csl-group.com.

[1] Digital Health (2025) ‘94% of NHS acute trusts have an EPR in place, finds report’. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/05/94-of-nhs-acute-trusts-have-an-epr-in-place-finds-report/

[2] Menon, S. et al. (2018) ‘Impacts on Laboratory Testing in a Large Multispecialty Clinic During an Electronic Health Record Transition’, Applied Clinical Informatics, 9(4), pp. 882-892. https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-0038-1676043

[3] Tully, J.L. et al. (2025) ‘Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage’, JAMA Network Open, 8(7):e2530226. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2836824

[4] NHS England (2024) ‘Synnovis cyber incident’. https://www.england.nhs.uk/synnovis-cyber-incident/

[5] National Audit Office (2018) Investigation: WannaCry cyber attack and the NHS. https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/investigation-wannacry-cyber-attack-and-the-nhs/

[6] Verizon (2025) 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report. https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/

[7] CISA (2024) ‘Leveraging the PACE Plan into the Emergency Communications Ecosystem’, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/leveraging-pace-plan-emergency-communications-ecosystem

[8] GOV.UK (2024) ‘Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN)’. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/public-switch-telephone-network-pstn