The health care sector is impacted by diminished reimbursements, increasing patient demands, and fierce competition among hospitals. Hospitals stay top of mind in the community and attract customers from competing facilities by offering new treatments and new technologies. And with new technology comes a need for more bandwidth. With more than 700,000 annual patient visits and an increased demand for services, Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey, was ready to upgrade its computerized systems.
Challenge:
As patient care needs increased, critical data and image-sharing became a top priority for Holy Name Hospital to guard against patient waits and delays for diagnoses. Holy Name had many communications carriers providing different services, making it difficult to identify which carrier managed which line. With the constant need to add bandwidth to scale to growth, cost became an issue. When Holy Name’s Information Technology team witnessed a massive outage caused by a storm in Rochelle Park, N.J., a few years ago, the case for diversifying communications providers to guarantee always-on operations was made.
Holy Name switched a majority of its communications services to Optimum Lightpath to avoid further outages, boost speed and increase reliability, bringing two dedicated fiber lines into its facilities from different streets for redundancy. Holy Name selected Optimum Lightpath for its highly reliable, fully redundant, self-healing Ethernet network and its high-availability, high-capacity voice/Internet bundle to power mission-critical applications and services for the hospital.
“Because of that storm, businesses’ phones were down for at least 24 hours and there was nothing they could do. We needed to make sure that never happened to us – we cannot live without phone or Internet services, so we switched to Optimum Lightpath,” said Mike Skvarenina, assistant vice president of Information Systems at Holy Name Hospital. “In a competitive environment like this, where patients demand and deserve the fastest, most advanced service, physicians need access to reports and images in seconds, not minutes. Speed is life and diversity is key.”
Solution:
Holy Name Hospital increased its bandwidth from a 3MB Internet connection to 100MB with Optimum Lightpath, adding much more capacity, speed and reliability for much less than it would cost for similar services with another carrier. “When I learned about Optimum Lightpath, it seemed like it offered the best of many worlds. First and foremost was the size of the (Internet) pipe (100MB) with the concept of peeling off just the bandwidth necessary for telecommunications services; next was the ‘fixed’ monthly cost and large allotment of minutes, and finally the idea of a ‘self-healing’ network – these all sounded very appealing.”
