Brocade Helps Singing River Health System Transform Care Delivery
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Brocade VDX switches
- Brocade VCS Fabric technology
Tech Stack
- Ethernet IP network
- Data center backup solution
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Singing River Hospital is the 415-bed flagship of Singing River Health System, which serves patients in southern Mississippi and Alabama. The health system’s 2,600 employees and 300 physicians provide centers of excellence in heart, cancer, neuroscience, women’s and children’s and rehabilitation health. In 2012, Singing River went live with an Epic EHR that included computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and linked it to its existing radiology picture archiving and communication system (PACS), cardiology PACS, and robotic pharmacy to better support the continuum of care. Over the years, the network has transformed from having 25 servers and no switches to more than 700 servers and state-of-the-art switching.
The Challenge
Singing River Health System, a healthcare provider in Mississippi and Alabama, faced a significant challenge in delivering superior patient care by sharing clinical information among hospitals and community medical clinics over a high-performance, reliable network. The need for a robust and reliable network was underscored by the experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the region and highlighted the importance of disaster recovery solutions. The organization began to redesign its IT network, data storage, and backup capabilities to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. In addition, a plan was developed to support the growing bandwidth demands of its Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical images, analytics, and mobility. As clinical data, images, and video continued to increase and strain network bandwidth, response time, and network uptime, Singing River executives realized that their goal of seamless sharing of clinical information among hospitals, clinics, and physician offices required upgrading the health system’s IT infrastructure.
The Solution
Based largely on its success with Brocade® storage area network (SAN) technology, the health system selected Brocade to also provide its Ethernet IP network and data center backup solution. Brocade offered the most advanced and easiest-to-implement technology at the right cost. The health system implemented Brocade VDX switches and Brocade VCS Fabric technology. Using networking technology from Brocade, Singing River now takes only seconds to establish business continuity in the event of a disaster. User response time also improved dramatically with the upgraded network infrastructure. When the hospital system implemented its EHR with Citrix servers, user response time was an industry standard 15 seconds. After deploying Brocade VCS Fabric technology, which includes virtual cluster switching, the response time dropped to 7 seconds— including remote sessions under the highest data load possible.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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