Faster images mean faster diagnosis and happier patients
Oct 9, 2009 12:20 PM
By Carol Wilson
Holy Name Hospital even saves money on integrated voice-data system
Like most medical facilities, Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, NJ, is heavily dependent on its telecommunications facilities and looks first and foremost for reliability of service. At the same time, Holy Name’s bandwidth needs are growing, as medical images are more commonly shared between facilities and physicians.
Holy Name has made a name for itself on the cutting edge of medical technology being the first hospital in New Jersey to perform Cardiac PET/CT stress testing, a process that is available at only a handful of U.S. medical institutions and is the first to offer both Cardiac PET/CT stress testing and 64-Slice CT Angiography. The hospital handles more than 700,000 patient visits each year.
Until three years ago, however, Holy Name was not on the cutting edge of telecom systems. The 83-year-old hospital had dealt with its bandwidth needs by relying on three different service providers. Verizon was the major provider but Holy Name needed voice redundancy, and had a separate 3-megabit-per-second service from its ISP.
“We were having lots of issues,” said Mike Skvarenina, assistant vice president of Information Systems at Holy Name Hospital. “The Internet access was becoming very slow with many of the hospital personnel accessing the Internet for day-to-day business. In addition, we were paying quite a lot for the dual T-1 service. And with three different carriers, we have three different bills, and a lot of inefficiencies.”
Optimum Lightpath, the all-fiber business service provider arm of Cablevision, approached Holy Name with an offer to provide a fiber-based Ethernet service at 100 Megabits per second that would actually cost the hospital less than its current services. The integrated voice and data service would allow Holy Name to use as much of the bandwidth as it wanted for voice services and still support much higher data throughput.
That offer was appealing, but Skvarenina had some concerns about reliability, having seen what happened a flood hit the local Verizon Central Office a few years back.
“A few years ago there was a flood, and the CO that served our telephone system was underwater and caused a disruption,” Skvarenina said. “We wanted to find a plan with a definite backup. I was also concerned about problems right here outside the hospital walls, like what would happen if someone hits the telephone pole and knocks out our service right here. ”
The answer to the reliability question proved to be two-fold: Optimum Lightpath offered its multi-homing self-correcting fiber network as one part of the answer, and then agreed to run two independent fiber lines from two different streets into the hospital, to provide complete redundancy.
Moving to the Optimum Lightpath platform enabled Holy Name to provide access to its online clinical information database both in the hospital and from remote sites. This has allowed physicians and other caregivers to gain access to test results, CT/nuclear and PET scan images and patient histories much faster, whether they are accessing those records remotely from the home, from a physicians’ office, at the patient bedside or in the emergency room, Skvarenina said.
“Our Picture Archiving and Communications systems, or PACS, is an online radiology repository of images,” he explained. “We don’t do any film radiology at all anymore. All x-rays are digital from start to finish, and they are stored on the PACS system. Then a radiologist can recall that image and make diagnostic decisions about it.”
As more images went into the PACS system, there was a greater need to read the exams from in the hospital or from remote sites, Skvarenina said. With its previous 3 Meg pipe, it could take five to 10 minutes to load a package of exams, leaving doctors frustrated, he said. “Now with the much bigger pipe, they are loading exams in 10 to 20 second,” Skvarenina said. “That’s been the biggest benefit – the doctors are much happier now, much less frustrated.”
The new network also enables real-time registration for pandemic detection surveillance and patient insurance validation.
With all of those benefits, Holy Name is saving about $50,000 a year on its telecommunications services, Skvarenina said, and has simplified its billing process as well, by moving to a single provider for most of its services.
“For right now, we are keeping on traditional carrier as a backup so that if there is a problem, we would be able to fall back on somebody else if there were to be a problem,” he said. “But it’s much easier on the billing process than what we had before.”
Much of that savings comes from eliminating the dual T-1s that Holy Name was paying for, and combining the voice and data traffic onto one network. Since all health care institutions are under pressure to operate more cost-effectively, the savings is a significant part of the story, Skvarenina said. But so is the ability to improve patient care in order to compete with other local hospitals.
“We operate in a competitive environment,” he said. “Patients are demanding the highest level of care. If physicians can access reports and images in seconds, not minutes, they are able to provide better care and faster care.”
Optimum Lightpath had approached Holy Name as part of its plan to market to all of the major health care facilities within its New York metropolitan area footprint, which includes Long Island, NJ, and parts of Connecticut.
“We have been delivering high-quality service on our all-fiber network to businesses in general, but when it comes to hospitals, we have carved out a special solid niche within that vertical,” said Nick Rae, manager, Marketing Development for Optimum Lightpath. “Optimum Lightpath services 70% of the hospitals within our footprint, including almost 100% on Long Island. We have a solid understanding of customer needs in the hospital segment. Holy Name Hospital is a shining example. This is a sophisticated group of businesses that aspires to improve operations while improving patient care and controlling costs at the same time. By migrating to this suite of services, Holy Name is able to deploy solutions that reduce patient care time by hours rather than minutes. For hospitals, speed is critical, because speed is life.”