SAN JOSE, Calif., August 11, 2004 - Cisco Systems® today announced that Mokena, Illinois-based Provena Health community hospitals has deployed a Cisco Medical-Grade Network to support their current and future network requirements. The Cisco Medical-Grade Network is a suite of products, services and supporting material aimed at offering healthcare providers an end-to-end foundation for the delivery of high-quality medical care.
The third-largest Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) in the greater Chicago area, Provena Health is a community-based, Catholic health system comprised of six acute care hospitals and 14 owned and four managed long-term care and residential facilities. All of Provena's healthcare facilities are deriving significant security, operational and productivity benefits, and ultimately improving patient care in part from Cisco's integrated Medical-Grade Network architecture.
"Because of our commitment to clinical quality and advanced clinical applications, we were looking to implement a secure, reliable and scalable networking infrastructure," said Jonathan Manis, CIO, Provena Health. "The Cisco Medical-Grade Network not only meets our business and patient-care objectives today, but it also forms the foundation for ongoing clinical application advancements."
Meeting Today's Healthcare Needs, While Planning for the Future
Provena Health found themselves in a challenging situation: they had a network that was no longer being supported, coupled with multiple points of failure within the network. Provena Health wanted to improve their overall quality of patient care, staff efficiency, and time to treatment, while sustaining a competitive advantage for their facilities.
Provena turned to Cisco to help design a network that would meet their current business needs, especially in the areas of security, reliability and bandwidth. In addition, the architecture had to be scalable to support key future applications, such as Picture Archival and Communication Systems (PACS), wireless devices, and converged voice and data applications.
Working with SBC, Provena and Cisco implemented a highly reliable, hierarchical network design that provided a ten-fold increase in Provena's bandwidth capacity, while adding several layers of network redundancy. Security was also improved with an integrated security module that included intrusions detection and user identification capabilities. In all, more than 10,000 ports were converted at the six hospitals and 65 remote sites. Equally significant is the timetable to complete the project: what started out to be an estimated three-year project was completed in approximately eight months.
"Advanced clinical applications enable Provena to deliver the highest quality clinical care, and these applications all require high-bandwidth," added Manis. "In addition to the increased bandwidth capacity, enhanced security, reliability and manageability, Provena was also impressed with the speed in which the network was deployed by our partners, SBC and Cisco."
About Cisco Medical-Grade Network
Cisco's Medical-Grade Network helps enable healthcare providers to build a common platform for the deployment of business productivity functions and the seamless delivery of device and location-independent applications - all supported by centralized administration and maintenance. The Medical-Grade Network addresses the unique requirements of the healthcare organization's 24x7 work environment, characterized by a network that is Responsive, Highly Protected, Resilient and Interactive.
