V E R T I C A L B R O C H U R E

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V E R T I C A L B R O C H U R E

healthcare

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The healthcare industry must effectively address a growing range of challenges, while focused on the over-riding goal of saving lives. Faced with a broad set of technological, de-mographic, and regulatory changes, healthcare IT managers are adopting new strategies to address the key challenges and opportunities, with a focus on the following four opera-tional imperatives:

1. Supporting Advanced Medical Technologies – Healthcare firms are adopting an array of new and highly sophisticated medical technologies that increase medical treatment options. These capabilities are based on access to new technological devices and services, delivered from supplier to hospital, from bedside to lab, and from doctor to patient.

2. Ensuring Regulatory Compliance – The Health Insur-ance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States and similar regulations around the world mandate stringent requirements for data integrity and the security of patient records. These regulations govern data creation, storage and retrieval related to patient records and information, and as such are placing ad-ditional demands on the IT department.

3. Enabling Robust First Responders Capabilities – In the wake of natural disasters and national security threats, healthcare organizations are critical first re-sponders, requiring robust, dependable communica-tions, networking, and business continuity capabilities.

4. Reducing Operating Costs – Like all firms, health-care organizations utilize IT to reduce costs, improve resource utilization, and increase productivity while seeking to enhance the level of service that they deliver to their patients, employees, and partners.

FPL FiberNet Ethernet and Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) Solutions are ideal for meeting the networking needs of the healthcare sector. These services provide a flexible and highly reliable network to inter-connect hospitals, clinics, laboratories, business offices, and patients – over metro-politan and wide area networks. With Ethernet technology as one of the foundations for optical transport and various services, healthcare providers gain highly-available access to mission-critical applications, with support for both IP-based and legacy services. These network capabilities help today’s extended healthcare delivery organizations deliver life-saving medical treatment while ensuring that stringent regulatory requirements are met, and unlocking new efficiencies that reduce operating costs.

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FPL FiberNet Ethernet VPN Solutions enabled by Alcatel-Lucent’s highly reliable Service Router platform, seamlessly extend accessibility to health care, customer data, and business applications. Expanding beyond those locations directly connected to the LAN, access can be provided to all locations – over a metropolitan or wide area network, using either point-to-point (VLL) or multipoint (VPLS) Ethernet VPN services; all supported by strictly enforced SLAs.

Ethernet VPN services are the ideal solution for network-ing IP-centric applications, offernetwork-ing service differentiation enabled by service-aware QoS, to ensure that network performance aligns with application requirements. VPLS is often preferred by healthcare institutions with a policy of maintaining routing control in-house and also supporting non IP-based applications.

FPL FiberNet Ethernet VPN Solutions offer a wide range of network connectivity, for metropolitan, national, and interna-tional configurations. Coupled with ease of implementation and other value-added features, Ethernet solutions are ide-ally suited to the complex requirements of many healthcare institutions.

Fig. 1: Traditional Optical Transport of Ethernet over TDM Networks

SONET SONET

SONET

SONET _Regional out-patient center Main data center FN POP Remote disaster recovery center FN POP Physician offices Out-patient center Hospital Lab diagnostic center

• Fixed bandwidth increments, resulting in expensive “cost-per-bit”

and inefficient bandwidth utilization

• Only point-to-point service over a single port

• No mechanism to differentiate between voice, video and

data applications

• Fixed protocol

• Expensive WAN interfaces Regional data center Regional hospital Regional hospital Regional hospital ISP network Research network

ethernet vPn soLutions

Fig. 2: Modern Optical Transport of Ethernet using VPNs over MPLS Network

• Offers highly scalable growth that can be quickly upgraded

• Supports multiple services over a single port

• Offers very high bandwidth WAN connections

• Delivers a more cost effective per-bit” than traditional data services • Provides QoS/CoS options for voice, video and data applications • Eliminates the need for expensive WAN interfaces

• Allows better utilization of bandwidth

• Provides protocol transparency out-patient centerRegional

250 Mb/s access Main data center 1 Gb/s Out-patient center 500 Mb/s access Hospital 500 Mb/s access Lab diagnostic center 500 Mb/s access FN POP ISP network Research network Physician offices 50 Mb/s EoMPLS Regional data center 1 Gb/s access Regional hospital

10 Mb/s access_{Regional hospital}Regional hospital10 Mb/s access 10 Mb/s access FN MPLS metro network FN MPLS metro network FN MPLS core network FN POP Remote disaster recovery center 1 Gb/s

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MediCaL

teChnoLogies

To meet patients’ needs, healthcare organizations must constantly incorporate advanced new medical technolo-gies, new medications, and new procedures. These medical advances require new and enhanced applications to support them, placing tremendous pressures on IT departments. Examples of these applications include the following:

• Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) for effective management of diagnostic imaging information, with files that are continuously growing in size.

• Automated advanced software applications that ensure physicians, pharmacists, and nurses dispense proper medications, in the right dose, at the right time, to the correct patients.

• Anywhere, anytime access to patient applications by combining documentation software with wireless de-vices, allowing for physicians, nurses, technicians and therapists to conduct bedside charting.

• Just-in-time purchasing software and perpetual inven-tory control software applications.

• Internet and Internet 2 for research, collaboration, and web-enabled access to a vast global array of information and applications.

• Tele- and video-conferencing for teaching, training and outpatient services.

ensuring

reguLatory CoMPLianCe

Today’s healthcare sector is increasingly driven by regulatory compliance requirements such as HIPPA and other govern-mental mandates. Secure, reliable, and efficient access to patient data is a key aspect of compliance. With patient data stored on network servers and often backed up to remote data centers, its availability therefore depends on a highly reliable and resilient network combined with effective and efficient storage strategies. FPL FiberNet Ethernet and DIA Solutions address these requirements and can ensure the information will always be available.

Ethernet and DIA Solutions offer the inherent security associated with a Layer 2 network (virtual connections). When used in conjunction with higher layer security elements, such as stateful firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and anti-virus appliances, security can be assured across all sites and to all computing/storage systems.

• High Reliability – Network elements used in FPL Fi-berNet Ethernet Services and Data Backup and Storage services are built to the highest level of reliability – offer-ing solutions that can be optimized for five 9s (99.999%) availability, with fail-over restoration within 50ms.

• Back-up and Storage – To keep patient records ac-cessible, secure and backed-up, computing centers and disaster recovery facilities can be connected through economical, resilient point-to-point data backup and storage services, with full line rate support for native protocols and enhanced distance tolerances.

dediCated internet aCCess

Dedicated Internet Access provides routed Internet bandwidth over the FPL FiberNet network to multiple, geographically diverse peering locations. Based on the highly reliable Alcatel-Lucent Service Router platform, the FPL FiberNet network ensures these connections are fully resilient and highly reliable. FPL FiberNet has established interconnection arrangements in Miami (NAP of the Ameri-cas) and a diverse location in Atlanta (Telx), allowing us to survive disaster scenarios affecting any particular facility. This allows FPL FiberNet to offer a higher level of perfor-mance and reliability when compared to any single loca-tion service provider. Figure 3 demonstrates this concept:

Fig. 3: Internet peering overview

Site 1 Site 3 Geographically_diverse Tier 1 carriers

FN MPLS metro network Internet

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enaBLing roBust first

resPonders CaPaBiLities

When an emergency strikes, healthcare providers are among the first to respond, providing immediate critical care and support. Healthcare data and communications network are essential to such an effective response. During times of crisis, FPL FiberNet ensures the network remains highly available and operating at peak performance.

• High Availability – Providing an infrastructure utilizing carrier grade network elements built to stringent reliability requirements and incorporating resilient failure recovery mechanisms at the optical and MPLS layer, FPL FiberNet Ethernet and DIA Solutions can be optimized for five 9s (99.999%) availability, with fail-over restoration of less than 50 ms.

• Scalability – Making available, through carrier operations systems, the ability to incrementally increase or decrease bandwidth as needed, without equipment upgrades, changes or unacceptable delays.

• Response Time – Enabling pre-designed disaster recov-ery and back-up plans to be executed under emergency conditions.

reduCing oPerating Costs

Healthcare providers strive to manage costs, reduce er-rors, and accommodate growing patient volumes, all within the mandate of improving the overall quality of patient care. These goals must be achieved with an eye towards optimiz-ing financial performance to ensure that they can continue to grow and provide these much–needed medical services. With higher bandwidth and reliability, FPL FiberNet Ethernet and DIA Solutions help healthcare providers improve operat-ing performance.

• Reducing Medical Errors – Reducing the chance of

medical errors by implementing best practices system-wide, for hospital, physicians, nurses and administrators.

• Lower TCO – Utilizing a network infrastructure that provides a significantly lower TCO when compared to other WAN alternatives in high capacity / availability implementations.

• Enhanced Efficiency – Increasing efficiency of health-care delivery by networking PACS, electronic medical records (EMR), physician order-entry (POE), and other advanced applications, enabling the sharing of essential patient and administrative information over a highly reli-able, flexible, and scalable wide-area network. By net-working hospitals, clinics, laboratories, business offices, and patients, access to a widely dispersed network of users over a lower-cost, reliable, flexible, high-bandwidth wide area network is enabled.

• Extending Reach – Increasing the reach and accessibil-ity of advanced and high-value medical procedures and services to a broader patient base.

• Speeding Service and Reducing Cost per Patient – Minimizing diagnostic and treatment time, enabling more patients to be served in existing care facilities, lowering overall per patient costs.

• Consolidating Storage Requirements – Concentrating patient record databases in fewer data centers, minimiz-ing support resources and decreasminimiz-ing maintenance fees.

• Streamlining Supply Chains – Shrinking supply chain costs by connecting primary and affiliated hospitals with teaching and acute care facilities to centralize large or-ders, enforcing supplier contracts for medical equipment, supplies and drugs, and maintaining stock levels across all hospitals and facilities.

• Reducing IT Management Costs – Lowering IT man-agement costs by removing LAN/WAN protocol conver-sion, avoiding the need to monitor multiple WAN access network elements, and eliminating the need for IT exper-tise and support of multiple legacy WAN services such as ATM, Frame Relay, and private line.

• Improving Productivity with converged networks – Ethernet and Data Storage services can merge multiple access facilities and applications, creating a simplified enterprise WAN that promotes the highest levels of medical care.

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Application & Carrier Ethernet Solution Matrix

APPLICATION DESCRIPTION NETWORK/IT

REQUIREMENTS FPL FIbERNET EThERNET AND DIA SOLUTIONS

ERP/Inventory Management Solutions

Used to improve supply chain and inventory man-agement, the penetration of these systems is low and expected to accelerate as healthcare organizations retire legacy and old materi-als management and other stand-alone supply systems

» High network availability

» Quality of service perfor-mance

» Network flexibility and scalability to accommodate bursts of traffic

» Fiber-optic MPLS network using 10Gbps pro-tected links and diversified for fiber, route, equip-ment and power

» Customer site fiber and port protection available as value add

» NOC support 24x7x365

» QoS and bursting available as value add features

Electronic Medical Re-cords (EMR) and Computer-ized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) Healthcare organizations are upgrading legacy and underperforming IT systems used to automate patient records with computer-ized systems that eliminate handwritten physicians’ orders

» Network security

» Network extensibility en-abling remote and mobile access

» Network storage and retrieval

» Ethernet and DIA in conjunction with firewalls, IDS, encryption and anti-virus for a highly secure network

» Presence in all top Florida MSAs enabling large and varied access with Ethernet VPN

» Service supports ESCON, FICON & Fiber Chan-nel for both synchronous and asynchronous data storage

Wireless and

RFID The FDA mandates bar coding which is driving adoption of Radio Fre-quency Identification (RFID) technologies over the next 2-3 years. Physicians and technicians are also using wireless technologies closer to the point of care with patients (i.e. bedsides)

» Assimilation of huge amounts of data from an exponential number of devices and data tags

» Scalable network connec-tivity

» High levels of resiliency, with a highly available and secure network

» Bandwidth from 10Mbps to 10Gbps available, with interconnection and access options between a large number of sites with Ethernet VPN

» Customer site fiber and port protection available as value add

» NOC support 24x7x365

» Ethernet and DIA in conjunction with firewalls, IDS, encryption and anti-virus for a highly secure network Picture Ar-chiving and Communica-tion Systems (PACS)

MRI, CT and ultra sound tests are now digital and PACS systems enable the transmission and archival of these large digital images: - Mammography (32MB) - Radiography (8-32MB) - Tomography (20 MB) - Ultrasound (5-8MB) - MRI (8 MB)

» Scalable network capacity for huge data files

» High performance con-nectivity

» Extensive network capable of reaching out patient and remote locations

» Quality of service perfor-mance

» Bandwidth from 10Mbps to 10Gbps with QoS and bursting available as value add features

» Presence in all top Florida MSAs enabling large and varied access with Ethernet VPN

Business Con-tinuity / Disas-ter Recovery Data Center Storage

Driven by homeland secu-rity, HIPPA other regula-tions and general business practices, off-site data stor-age and retrieval are vital IT functions for healthcare organizations providing data back-up and recovery

» Private, secure networking

» Flexible network capacity to accommodate large un-planned data transmissions

» High availability and surviv-ability

» Ethernet and DIA in conjunction with firewalls, IDS, encryption and anti-virus for a highly secure network

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APPLICATION DESCRIPTION NETWORK/IT

REQUIREMENTS FPL FIbERNET EThERNET AND DIA SOLUTIONS

Internet and

Internet2 Support for Internet-based research, collaboration, email and Web access

» High performance connec-tivity, with high availability and resiliency

» Highly scalable network capacity to adapt to grow-ing demand for increased collaboration activities

» Bandwidth from 10Mbps to 10Gbps available

Medical and Professional Training

Use of video and other interactive communications technologies for staff train-ing, teachtrain-ing, and profes-sional development

» Real-time quality of service performance

» Highly scalable network ca-pacity to support growing demands for video-based communications

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Benefits of fPL fiBernet

ethernet and dia soLutions

FPL FiberNet Ethernet Services have the features IT manag-ers demand to deliver the operational benefits they need.

• Reliability – Solutions can be optimized for up to five 9s (99.999%) availability, with fail-over restoration of 50ms. Additionally, these solutions are based on Ethernet; the most widely used networking technology in place today, ensuring a stable operation.

• Scalability – No other technology provides such high capacity and the ability to scale like Ethernet and DIA ser-vices. Implementations starting at 10Mbps can be easily upgraded in granular increments, up to 10Gbps.

• Dependable Access to Data – Healthcare data ser-vices need to be available 24x7x365, and FPL FiberNet Ethernet Services deliver very high availability, com-bined with 50 ms fail-over optical transport restoration or MPLS fast re-route. Strictly enforceable, QoS-based SLAs enable mission-critical performance across the wide area network.

• Flexibility – A scalable, adaptive infrastructure supports growth, change and transformation in the healthcare environment.

soLutions for Business

Continuity and disaster

reCovery soLutions

Implementing a cost-effective data storage/re-trieval system is critical to a successful Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery implementation, while addressing regulatory concerns. Ethernet services support these requirements by connect-ing through economical, resilient point-to-point Data Backup and Storage services, with full line rate support for native protocols and enhanced distance tolerance.

Storage-over-Ethernet/MPLS provides a resilient solution for point-to-point or multipoint asynchro-nous storage applications, such as data replica-tion and back-up. As a Layer 2 protocol, Ethernet can automatically support high layer protocols such as ESCON, FICON and Fiber Channel. Completely diversified fiber optic infrastructure from other service providers adds another level of protection for Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery implementation.