The Key to IS Technology: Re-Engineering Versus Replacement - Lucent Technologies Cajun P550 gigabit switch - Product Information

Health Management Technology, May, 1999 by Shirley Oakley

* Re-engineering a hospital system becomes a necessity for keeping up with technology.

* Process re-engineering is a good place to start.

To replace or to re-engineer, that is the question. Although it was never an issue for Shakespeare, IS professionals have been debating and evading this noble dilemma. Add Y2K and stir and what is produced is a magnificent scheme of solutions, characteristically varied--the answer to everyone's infrastructure prayers.

At what point do you through in the towel, throw down your guns, and surrender to the process of change?

Oak Valley Hospital made that decision and set reliability standards in their high-performance campus network. Unplug the central network switch at the core of Oak Valley Hospital District, and the network will be up and running again in two seconds, granting users full access to important patient records and other life-or-death resources. Impressive? Sure, but Oak Valley would accept nothing less than a highly reliable network that enables its healthcare staff to deliver the best possible patient care.

Oak Valley Hospital District, located 100 miles east of San Francisco, turned to Lucent Technologies for enterprise data networking equipment to make this high-performance, fault-tolerant network a reality. The network serves a healthcare system that includes 33 licensed acute-care beds (Oak Valley District Hospital), 110 skilled nursing beds (Oak Valley Care Center) and services ranging from outpatient to long-term care.

Process of Upgrading

David Rodrigues, Information Systems Manager at Oak Valley Hospital, explains the choice and the process of upgrading their existing system.

"We already had a nice infrastructure here at the hospital, however, our main switch did not support Gigabit Ethernet. Our closets in each building consisted of fast hubs to support 100 shared to the desktop. We run a standard protocol, and run all PC's. We wanted to stay on top of technology, and prepare for the implementation of MEDITECH. We decided to implement a Gigabit infrastructure (Gig around the backbone and from the servers to the data center) and run 100 switched to the desktop.

"How? We already had a "ring" of fiber around the entire campus, cat 5 throughout all the buildings, and all the closets are in place. We swapped out all the hubs with Lucent switches and created a redundant ring for the data, with a main switch in the middle. Now I can monitor various segments of the network from my desk with a Web browser. We get the throughput we need, have a Y2K compatible network infrastructure, and are all ready for MEDITECH."

Implementing Tomorrow's Network Today

Oak Valley's network uses Lucent's Cajun P550 Gigabit Switch in its data center and four additional P550s within its five-block campus. There's one each in the Oak Valley District Hospital, the Oak Valley Care Center, the finance building and the medical records building. Each link in the distributed star topology carries two gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwidth (200 times faster than standard local area network links), the result of trunking two, one-Gbps ports together. Additional gigabit links connect all four outlying buildings in a "hot standby" ring that automatically takes over if any other link in the network fails. These are the core components of a system designed to accommodate increasing data traffic as the hospital campus brings more bandwidth to its 300 endpoints and begins implementing a new hospital information system.

"With Lucent's Cajun P550 Gigabit Switches, we're implemented tomorrow's network today, and we've done so significantly under budget," said Rodrigues. He credits Network Administrator Michael Hendricks, former IS Manager Jason Braatz, IS Specialist Tim Clegg, and IS Coordinator Sherri Fulton for helping create the network. "The network is a bulletproof design, and Lucent provided the hardware that enabled us to turn the design into a bulletproof network. It's not just about the network, of course. But the network is one of the factors that enables us to deliver the best available healthcare to our patients."

The new campus network enables healthcare professionals to access critical patient data faster and more reliably while providing desperately needed bandwidth for future feature-rich applications. Among them is a Medical Information Technology Inc. (MEDITECH) client/server health information system. The system will track patients from the day they register through the day they go home, computerizing every hospital function along the way. When nurses take an IV bag from a shelf, for instance, they will log the action on a PC, and the system will automatically update billing, inventory, accounting and purchasing records.

Big Bandwidth All the Way to the Desktop

In addition to supporting its new MEDITECH application, Oak Valley's Gigabit Ethernet backbone provided the hospital with the bandwidth needed for its "100/100 Project," which involved migrating 100 percent of its endpoints to switched, full-duplex Fast Ethernet (100 MBPS) or better in 100 days. Switched Fast Ethernet means endpoints get a full 100Mbps of service instead of sharing it with the other endpoints on a hub. This means network administrators don't need to constantly tinker with virtual LAN configurations to provide sufficient bandwidth to users and endpoints. The backbone is also providing full Gigabit Ethernet (1,000 Mbps) service to the eight Windows NT servers on which MEDITECH runs.