What are the components of a hospital clock system?

Time is the concept of life, especially in a hospital system, time is extremely precious. Each system and module requires clock synchronization, which is the hospital clock system. To ensure clock synchronization among each department and hospital system, reduce problems and accidents caused by time errors, and provide better service guarantees, the hospital clock system is a better solution to this situation.

So, what are the components of a hospital clock system? Is the setup complicated? This is a concern for many hospital managers. Generally speaking, a clock system is composed of a clock server, a satellite receiving antenna (commonly known as a mushroom head), a multi-port switch, and some slave clocks or display clocks, as well as some accessories such as feeders, network cables, and switches.

Among them, the clock server is the key point of the entire hospital clock synchronization system. Without it, the others are just accessories. This type of clock server is usually called an NTP network clock device, which can transmit time signals to the slave clocks, sub-clocks, or time synchronization terminals below it. The steps of the entire hospital clock synchronization are as follows:

1. The satellite receiving antenna receives the GNSS time signal and transmits this time information to the clock server. It should be noted that the placement of the satellite has certain requirements. It should be placed on the roof of a building with no obstructions around, so that the sky can be seen from all directions without any dead angles blocking the satellite signal, to avoid unstable received signals.

2. The clock server, through its algorithm function, transmits the time signal it receives to the slave clocks, sub-clocks, or time synchronization terminals below it. They are just called differently, but basically can all be referred to as slave clocks or sub-clocks. Here, it is also necessary to note that each sub-clock or time synchronization terminal device should have its own independent IP to avoid IP conflicts among each time synchronization device within the local area network, which may affect clock synchronization.

3. The connection of slave clocks, sub-clocks, and time synchronization devices mainly depends on the total number. According to the hospital's scale, at least a switch is needed to connect them to the clock server (master clock) through the network, that is, through network cables. If the hospital is very large, multiple clock servers may be required.

Synchronization parameters of the hospital clock system: Currently, most of our hospital time synchronization is at the millisecond level, so they are basically composed of NTP network clock devices for the synchronization system. Therefore, their clock synchronization accuracy is also at the millisecond level. However, some equipment and systems within the hospital may require higher precision clock synchronization, which requires PTP clock servers.