Healthcare Centers Worldwide Turn to Cisco to Help Improve Patient Care and Efficiency and Cut Costs

February 3, 2005

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

Hospitals worldwide are making healthy use of the latest networking technology from Cisco Systems® to help improve patient care, create efficiency improvements and reduce costs.

The move to networked applications based on IP infrastructure is in response to a range of driving forces, including aging populations in developed countries, increases in the tools, techniques and treatments available for patients and growth in public access to information.

Finite resources for healthcare, increased citizen mobility and the evidence for productivity gains from web-based technologies are also helping boost the uptake of new network technologies in the hospital sector. IP networks can help modern healthcare organizations in a variety of ways.

They can, for example, make it possible for hospitals to move towards a paperless environment by providing the bandwidth to allow patient records, X-ray scans and other documents to be stored and delivered electronically, right up to the patient's bedside.

A study by the Central Utah Multi-Specialty Clinic has shown the use of electronic patient records, rather than hard-copy versions, could yield savings of US$8.2 million across a 59-physician center over five years.

IP telephony, meanwhile, allows hospitals to introduce new time-saving applications, such as instant messaging, while cutting infrastructure costs.

Networked technologies can also contribute to the advance of telemedicine and remote diagnostics, helping specialist doctors lend their skills, for both curing and teaching, over much wider geographical areas.

Similarly, wireless environments within hospitals can improve productivity by giving doctors and nursing staff instant access to patient records from any part of the building.

With modern network technologies, these benefits are safeguarded by a number of security protocols and barriers that ensure sensitive records are as secure as they would be in a traditional environment, or more so.

A number of hospitals around the world are already demonstrating the value of a move to IP network technologies.

For instance, the Indiana Heart Hospital, a 210,000-square-foot facility in northeast Indianapolis, opened in February 2003 as a completely film-less and paperless facility, using instead a Cisco technology platform supporting wireless networking, IP telephony and other applications.

Not needing a public branch exchange alone saved the hospital US$300,000. The time spent by clinical staff in searching for records has dropped from an hour a day to 15 seconds per patient. And other gains, in terms of patient record accuracy, efficiency and convenience, are significant.

Chris Cerny, manager of the Enterprise Networking team at Community Health Network, one of the joint venture partners behind the project, says: "We will always choose Cisco equipment first.

"Community Health Network standardized on Cisco because Cisco equipment is reliable, Cisco support is always available and accurate, and the equipment is scalable.

"We have found that Cisco is a company that takes great care in making sure it is thinking like a customer thinks and Cisco invests in and develops those technologies that will benefit the enterprise customer."

In Japan, the Gifu University Hospital has seen similar advances through the use of a Cisco 10Gbps optical backbone network providing 1Gbps links to each bedside, the world's first example of a hospital implementing an optic fiber network on such a large scale.

Approximately 2,800 optic fiber ports are installed throughout the hospital, which also has wireless LAN environments in all buildings. The network uses Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series switches at backbone nodes and Catalyst 4500 Series switches on each floor.

This allows bandwidth-intensive records such as computed tomography scans and magnetic resonance images to be stored and viewed online, saving on the handling and storage of the several thousand sheets traditionally required by a hospital of its size.

Together with speeding up diagnoses, this facilitates teamwork and makes it easier to increase the quality of medical services.

And in Europe, the Academic Hospital in Groningen is one of many healthcare facilities in the Netherlands alone using IP networks to raise the quality of patient care.

The hospital has a wireless system for blood transfusions whereby nurses with a handheld wireless mini-computer can scan the barcodes on a patient's armband and on the blood bag in order to eradicate errors.

If there are complications, it is easy to trace which batch of blood was used to treat the patient and when. Another benefit is that just one nurse can carry out a blood transfusion where previously two nurses were needed to reduce the likelihood of error.

Another Dutch healthcare provider, Zorggroep Noorderbreedte in Leeuwarden, is moving over to mobile IP telephony to page staff when they are needed to work in particular locations.

With the existing paging systems, employees who have been paged have to find a telephone to get further instructions. The IP phone is effectively a small computer that integrates a range of services, including telephoning, text messaging and an email service.

When personnel are paged, the IP-telephone displays details of the request for assistance and where it is needed.

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.