Numerous new Healthcare IT (HIT) initiatives are emerging, in part, due to mounting pressures to lower costs, enhance workflow effectiveness, and ultimately, improve patient safety and contribute to the reduction of medical errors. But to be cost-effective and ensure these initiatives are optimized to improve clinical outcomes, Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS), Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and other bandwidth-intensive HIT initiatives require a simple, reliable, high-performance network that supports all applications—connecting healthcare professionals with the information they need at the point of care, without delay or data loss.

Challenges

Historically, healthcare professionals have relied on carrier-managed services for network connectivity. With a new generation of sophisticated HIT applications, government regulations and increasing cost concerns, many healthcare providers now want more flexibility, efficiency and security than leased capacity on a shared public network sometimes affords. New initiatives including National Health Information Networks (NHINs) and connectivity to smaller rural providers is forcing HIT departments to think about their networks on both a local and national level. The challenge of creating a secure, reliable, and assured network that services more than just the immediate operation is quickly becoming a reality and an added complexity that must be addressed.

Solution

In order to gain more control over their existing network architecture and react with the speed and accuracy not normally associated with a leased network, healthcare providers are choosing the security and flexibility of a private optical network as a means to ensure availability, control and scalability. Today, optical fiber is more available and economical. The price/performance of networking equipment is at a point where carrier-class systems are common in many enterprise environments. Automation and software-configurability make self-management simple. And most importantly, the best private optical networks offer the flexibility to support every application and all types of traffic while optimizing performance and costs in a controlled, secure environment.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena’s assured, adaptive network is a practical blueprint for private optical networks supporting mission-critical applications, and it's implemented around the globe. Ciena’s assured network uses flexible, software-programmable hardware and leverages various technologies—such as C/DWDM, optical Ethernet, and next-generation SONET/SDH—to support any protocol on any port and optimize and switch traffic at the lowest possible layer, for minimum latency, maximum throughput, and applications transparency. Ciena's physical Layer 1 isolation of traffic streams provides enhanced security. This is ideal for HIT connectivity and business continuity/disaster recovery over any distance with solutions qualified by all major storage vendors, including EMC®, IBM®, Hitachi Data Systems®, McData® and Qlogic®.

Benefits

• Improve quality of care, clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction
• Total control of a highly reliable, secure network for any application over any distance
• Increase HIPAA compliance with the lowest latency storage transport network available
• Maximize the operational effectiveness and cost efficiency of critical HIT applications
• Unmatched reliability: Up to six-9s (99.9999%) availability (less than 31 seconds of unplanned downtime per year)
• Better performance with innovations to maximize bandwidth efficiency
• Ultimate flexibility through software-programmable ports that minimize capital expense
• Software tools simplify and automate private network management