Cox Edge opens new data center in Virginia; Cox’s IoT solution helps hospitals improve efficiency

According to the company, edge computing is becoming increasingly crucial as data-intensive use cases require lower latency and data processing. Cox Edge’s full stack edge-cloud infrastructure service gives companies access to a range of products that can accelerate use cases. Some examples include virtual compute, edge CDN, bare metal, distributed C-containers, serverless computing, and managed Kubernetes.

Proximity to customers is essential for selling services that leverage edge compute, as well. For instance, parent company Cox Communications offers an IoT solution called Cox ProSight that helps hospitals utilize real-time location services. This system helps track and monitor equipment and people inside a hospital.

As a complete platform solution, it helps automate manual tasks and understand asset utilization and workflows to improve the operational efficiency of staff and patient safety inside a hospital, the company says. For example, ProSight provides:

• Real-time tracking and monitoring of the status, location and utilization of hospital equipment
• Visitors and patients with a simple way to navigate through often complex hospital buildings and offices
• Ease of access to emergency assistance. One button push notifies safety and security personnel who can handle the situation without escalating it.
• Technology to check and monitor temperatures of sensitive items and spaces hospital-wide.

Naren Muthiah, strategy and business design lead from Cox, said in a recent webinar that there are about ten to fifteen connected devices in active use for each hospital bed and this number will increase. Further, the amount of data these devices generate will also increase.

“When you come outside of a hospital setting, it’s roughly about 3 million data points you’re collecting in every clinical trial, ” Muthiah said. “Recently Deloitte and MIT did a tech review and 30% of all global data, stored data is coming from healthcare and life sciences. Considering this amount of data coming from healthcare, it’s imperative not only to collect this data but to derive meaningful insights. And you need to be able to do that in a very time efficient manner to drive value for both the patients and the hospital and the service providers,” Muthiah noted.

The healthcare sector is constantly generating large amounts of data, and edge computing can help manage this data more efficiently. For example, it can help reduce latency and transport costs while improving applications’ resiliency. By processing data locally, rather than sending it all to the cloud, hospitals can get insights in real-time, improving patient care and overall efficiency.

Concerning patient care, AI-enabled imaging is one area where edge computing can make a big difference. Imaging is data intensive, and images must be processed locally to get real-time insights. This can help improve diagnosis and treatment for patients.

That said, edge computing is also complementary to the cloud. It helps decision-makers choose the best location for applications across the compute spectrum.

“It’s really about balancing performance to cost, all of that. Moving huge volumes of data to the cloud to process and then push it back isn’t efficient. Especially if the value of that insight is more real-time. You have to balance those things,” added Muthiah.

Article Topics

Cox Communications  |  COX Edge  |  data  |  edge data center  |  healthcare  |  IoT  |  PoP  |  security