Improving healthcare outcomes while containing costs

Healthcare organizations are seeking ways to implement reliable, cost-effective networking, while improving the efficiency of critical information access and storage.

Challenges for Health Care IT and telecom resources:

• Industry resources: Healthcare providers have limited IT resources to manage increasingly complex IT networks

• Fragmented industry structure: Industry consolidating into regional systems and networks with the resources and scale to invest in technology to streamline treatment and improve quality, while seeking to lower unit costs

• Pervasive healthcare: Patients and providers access continuous connection, regardless of their physical location

• Public influence: Governments recognize the opportunity to influence healthcare quality and costs, and will promote healthcare solutions that improve quality and reduce costs

Clinical and IT applications driving growth in healthcare networking:

• Imaging
• Home Health Monitoring
• Practice and Operations Management
• Electronic Healthcare Records
• Health Information Exchanges
• E-Prescribing
• Wi-Fi: providing more timely patient care while creating more efficient administrative operations

HealthCare organizations need network solutions that enable:

• Scalable, cost-effective high-speed Internet access to support web portals and applications
• Transport between Data Centers designed for secure storage of medical images, data and patient records
• Migration of costly TDM-based voice to a cost-effective IP-based infrastructure
• Virtual private networks to connect diverse geographic locations
• Business continuity and disaster recovery connectivity

High-performance private and IP VPN solutions can deliver more data throughput for the same or less costs as older networking.

Providing a Securely Connected, High-Performance Healthcare Network
Network connectivity in the healthcare environment must provide privacy and security while storing large amounts of long-term data, which needs to be accessible around-the-clock. A high-availability designed network can support this requirement while reducing costs with the convergence of data, voice, video, and imaging.

Storage architectures used to meet healthcare institution requirements.

Storage Area Network (SAN)

• Clinicians gain rapid access to key patient information regardless of their location  
• SAN networking address healthcare’s unique storage requirements while minimizing costs

Storage over a Metro-Optical Network

• Information sharing across a city or region while enabling an entire healthcare system to use a single physical SAN
• Enables high speed transmission of large files, such as diagnostic images

Storage over a Wide-Area Network

• Disaster recovery of key clinical and business data over long geographic distances
• WAN optimization can enhance the speed and capabilities of backup solution for the clinic, remote provider, and medical office building
• Provides disaster recovery access to applications and data, enabling resumption of operations in another location

Virtualization
Cost-effective storage virtualization promotes sharing and seamless usage of stored data by different applications.

Virtual Private Network (VPN) and private Ethernet solutions can meet security and privacy requirements by sending information over secure, dedicated links between locations. These connections are not shared: they provide a constant, reliable, and secure transmission path sized to meet specific information requirements.

In addition to security these solutions offer:

• Guaranteed throughput
• A predictable price without usage based variations
• No limitations due to network congestion
• Constant and predictable latency

Using next-gen technology, and backed by aggressive Service Level Agreements AboveNet offers health care providers the bandwidth scaling they need to meet their specific network requirements, while delivering superior reliability that is cost effective. And, this is done while meeting the privacy mandates of HIPAA. These communications solutions are designed, implemented, and managed by telecommunications experts with an average of over 20 years experience.