A centralized frequency agility technique is employed in conjunction with a plurality of medical body area network (MBAN) systems (10, 35, 36), each of which comprises a plurality of network nodes (12, 14) intercommunicating via short range wireless communication. A central network (20, 22, 23, 24) communicates with the MBAN systems via longer range communication that is different from the short range wireless communication. A central frequency agility sub-system (40) is configured to communicate with the MBAN systems. The central frequency agility sub-system receives current channel quality information for a plurality of available channels for the short range wireless communication, and allocates the MBAN systems amongst the available channels based at least on the received current channel quality information.
