Telecom Lead America: Concord Hospital is saving at least
$100,000 annually in IT staffing costs while increasing network performance to
support new facilities and bandwidth-hungry medical applications with Avaya’s
Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA).
By selecting Avaya, Concord Hospital, one of the most
wired medical facilities in the U.S., will save approximately 40 percent in
annual operational costs versus rival designs.
A pioneer in electronic medical records since 1966,
Concord Hospital relies on Avaya networking solutions to meet its growing
bandwidth needs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with zero downtime — a
critical factor so that patient care is not interrupted.
Concord Hospital’s network supports data services for its
main hospital facilities and provides access to approximately 100 external
locations such as clinics, physician offices and medical imaging facilities.
The hospital and its affiliates use the network to streamline patient care with
new digital information services such as computerized physician order entry;
medication bar coding; anywhere, anytime access to radiology and cardiology
images; and hands-free wireless communication devices.
To meet rising bandwidth requirements in its data center,
Concord Hospital selected the Avaya Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 9000 for
its network core. The hospital also added the Avaya VSP 7000 top-of-rack switch
to its data center to simplify operations and deliver high performance
switching with extremely low latency for critical server-to-server
communications.
These solutions allow the hospital to support
high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities today, and 40 and 100 Gigabit
when required in the future. Avaya VENA Switch Clustering capabilities further
enhance Concord’s network with true end-to-end reliability and active
resiliency for always-on access. This enables the hospital to perform
in-service maintenance and software upgrades in their network core while
maintaining the highest levels of network availability, which is critical in a
paperless hospital environment.
Concord Hospital’s ongoing investments in Avaya Network
Solutions enables the hospital to easily update and integrate newer systems as
needed without reengineering its entire network each time.
Avaya’s Platinum Partner for Concord Hospital is Integration
Partners of Boston, a full-service voice and data network engineering firm
which designs, implements and supports secure, fully converged networks.
This announcement highlights Avaya’s commitment to
bringing The Power of We to every Avaya customer to help drive faster
collaboration, smarter decisions and better business results.
“Concord Hospital’s goal is to provide the highest
quality patient care and the highest quality outcomes for every person who
walks through our door, and one of the ways we do that is through efficient use
of technology. We consider the network a utility in the same critical category
as electricity, oxygen and water — it needs to be available 24 hours a day,
365 days a year with zero tolerance for downtime. We’ve been with Avaya for
many years, and because of our strong emphasis on network capabilities, we’ve
been early adopters of technologies that many other organizations are just
getting into now. After very careful consideration, we decided to stay with
Avaya’s networking solutions because we’ve found the equipment to be rock solid
and saw no advantage to changing suppliers,” said Mark Starry, chief
technology officer, Concord Hospital.
