WAN improvements speed hospital network

Network World - Kootenai Medical Center and four other hospitals in northern Idaho faced a problem: Their regional hub-and-spoke network connecting to a common medical data center in Spokane, Wash., was too slow in transferring medical images.

A combination of additional links and gear from Converged Access solved the problem and staved off the need to buy even more T1s, which are expensive and scarce in that rural part of the state, said Tom Legel, CIO of Kootenai.

The problem wasn't the 100Mbit/sec fiber link between Kootenai -- the hub of the regional network in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho -- but rather, the T1s. Given the huge CT scans, clinical-data transfers and business applications, contention for bandwidth created problems for doctors trying to read images remotely, he said.

"The real issue was transmitting those images quickly and timely because images are a tremendous size in terms of bytes," Legel said. "In a lot of cases the radiologist in Coeur d'Alene tries to read for other hospitals."

The hospitals kicked in to buy an additional T1 linking them to Kootenai, which helped but didn't solve the problem. So they considered buying even more bandwidth but the cost became prohibitive. A T1 between Coeur d'Alene and just one of the hospitals in Sandpoint is $1,800 per month for the 45-mile connection. That adds up to more than $200,000 per year extra for one hospital, he said.

The hospitals tried adding intelligence to the network with Converged Traffic Manager, an appliance that prioritizes, compresses and optimizes applications to make traffic flow more smoothly. After a week, Legel installed five of the devices in the live network, one at each site. The Traffic Manager at Kootenai talked to the other four and shaped the links to give three levels of priority: imaging followed by clinical records and then business applications, he said.

It took about a week to send a technician to each hospital to install the devices and sync them up with the hub device at Kootenai, Legel said. Setup was done without requiring notification or help from the local T1 carrier, Verizon, he said.

The hospitals bought the Converged Access gear about a year ago, and with the cost of more bandwidth avoided, they were expected to pay for themselves in 14 months, Legel said.

A side benefit was that the gear gave the medical center a view into the use of a Wi-Fi network it had established in the area for a doctor office or at-home use of hospital applications. Three additional Converged Access boxes installed in the Wi-Fi network let the hospital set policies so that during busy periods critical business traffic got priority.

Legel said an important lesson earned from the experience was always to check beyond what service providers offer to improve network performance. "Figure you need to challenge the local phone company, because in some cases they don't have the technology you need," Legel said. "Always look for different ways of doing things."