OCTOBER 29, 2008 -- Ciena Corp. (search for Ciena) has announced that Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, New England's largest Catholic hospital, has deployed the CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to optimize patient care through high-performance connectivity across its hospital and data center facilities in Connecticut. The CN 4200 platform is being used to deliver LAN, voice, and video traffic and real-time access to such applications as Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), and disaster recovery and business continuity services.
The healthcare industry is going through a shift as new medical technologies and the move to digital record-keeping are placing increasing importance on the security and reliability of networks. In fact, according to a Hospitals and Health Networks Magazine survey, mortality rates are 7.2 percent lower in the "most wired" hospitals.
Saint Francis is one of only 5 percent of healthcare organizations in the U.S. that has fully adopted CPOE and bedside bar-code medication administration, Ciena says. Saint Francis recently built a private dark fiber network (instead of using leased lines) to maximize network control and increase patient data security, and also added a secondary data center for synchronous data replication and seamless disaster recovery. To optimize use of this private network, the hospital deployed Ciena's CN 4200 platform to provide a high-availability, low-latency networking environment to ensure seamless data backup and business continuity as well as on-demand delivery of bandwidth and storage-intensive applications between its main care facility and its primary and secondary data centers.
"At Saint Francis, we view IT as a cornerstone for improving patient safety and enhancing clinical care. Accordingly, as our medical teams and operations staff rely on an increasingly digital environment, it is critical that our core infrastructure supports the capacity and rapid delivery demands required to view, send, and store patient data across multiple locations in real time," said Dave Cote, manager of telecommunications and network engineering at Saint Francis Hospital. "Through Ciena's CN 4200's unique, multi-protocol capabilities and software-programmable hardware, we enable our doctors to deliver superior care with a network that can rapidly deliver any service to any remote location and cost-effectively scale to meet new service, speed and capacity demands."
The Hospital selected Ciena's CN 4200 through the EMC Select Program, which enables customers to easily acquire all required infrastructure components directly from EMC Corp. to meet their storage requirements.
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