Electronic Medical Records and Connectivity Boost Healthcare Efficiency

One key to stemming the rise of health care costs and improving patient care is the move away from paper-based systems toward automation and electronic medical records. The beauty of electronic records is that once they are created, they can be stored, duplicated and transmitted far faster and less expensively than paper forms. Physicians and other health care providers also have the opportunity to get far more comprehensive information on a patient than what is provided by typical paper records.

Electronic medical records, also called electronic health records, include such things as prescriptions, diagnoses, and patient data. They also include electronic imaging files such as X-ray, CT, PET, MRI and ultrasound results. This dramatically increases the size of the files compared to what you’d expect from simply digitizing written forms.

The irony of moving to electronic medial records is that the ability to transfer files from location to location, a major advantage of keeping everything in electronic form, can actually get bogged down to the point where you miss the old paper forms. This is due to both the volume of traffic increasing due to more records moving through the system and the sheer size of records with images attached.

The solution is to increase network bandwidth. Your internal LAN may have been upgraded already to handle massive file transfers efficiently. The big bottleneck is generally the WAN links. These connections go to insurance companies, physicians offices, therapy facilities, and other health care locations. If they are off-campus, you’ll almost certainly be dealing with metro or long haul network connections.

The days when a T1 connection seemed as fast as you’d ever need are pretty much over in the health care industry. A minimum entry point is now typically 10 Mbps for a smaller organization. You may not be sending and receiving that many records, but you don’t want to wait all day for them to transfer. Hospitals and other larger facilities really need fiber optic connections. Gigabit Ethernet is not at all unreasonable or uncommon these days. The prices for this bandwidth level have dropped more than an order of magnitude over what you had to pay a few years ago. There is are more providers competing for your business and technologies such as Ethernet over Fiber that challenge traditional SONET fiber optic services.

Another major concern is security. While paper files can be put behind locked doors and very carefully distributed, electronic files can be accessed via network weaknesses by those who have no right to the information. This means that network security is paramount for any organization handling sensitive patient information. One new approach to protecting data is the Cloud Firewall Service offered by Integra Telecom. This is a perimeter based system that carefully regulates what can enter the network via Internet connections such as log-ins from remote users. Inter-office connections are secured through the Integra MPLS network or your own VPN.

In fact, many medical organizations are moving or at least considering a move to cloud based computing, storage and communications to reduce costs and provide the rapidly scaleable performance needed to handle varying workloads. This puts additional demands on your metro and wide area network connections plus the need for robust security in the cloud. It is projected that healthcare organizations could account for over 20% of the cloud computing market within 5 years.

Is your healthcare organization bogged down by slow network connections or looking to expand to meet rising demand? A number of major network service providers have packaged specifically tailored to meet the needs of healthcare organizations from physicians offices on up to the largest hospitals. Get features and prices on bandwidth and cloud services that are right for the size of your organization.

Why The WAN Lags The LAN

Networks are often thought of as nearly transparent to the flow of data between nodes. Corporate LANs are managed to ensure there is enough bandwidth to prevent productivity killing network congestion within the organization. But it doesn’t take long to find the real choke point in most networks. It’s the connection with the outside world, called the WAN.

The WAN or Wide Area Network differs from the LAN or Local Area Network in more than name. They traditionally use completely different technologies.

LANs are based on the Ethernet standard. Devices that connect to the LAN have standardized NICs or Network Interface Cards. That includes PCs, servers, printers and other peripherals. The most popular interface is 10/100 Mbps. That means the device will operate on Ethernet LANs running at the standard 10 or 100 Mbps speeds. The 10/100/1000 Mbps interface is becoming more popular and increasingly seen in new devices. It maintains compatibility with 10 Mbps Ethernet and 100 Mbps, also called Fast Ethernet, and adds a new speed of 1000 Mbps, also called Gigabit Ethernet or GigE.

Now, compare these network speeds with typical WAN connections. The most popular WAN service is the T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. Larger businesses often have DS3 connections that run at 45 Mbps. Only the largest or most bandwidth-dependent organizations have higher speed fiber optic WAN connections. These range from OC3 at 155 Mbps to OC48 at 2.5 Gbps. The largest ISPs and telecom carriers may have backbones at OC-192 or 10 Gbps. Nationwide fiber optic network backbones run at OC-768 or 40 Gbps.

Chances are your business is likely running a LAN network at 100 Mbps. When you access the Internet or connect to another of your company’s facilities via dedicated point to point data line, you may be connecting over a T1 line at 1.5 Mbps. That’s almost two orders of magnitude difference. You’ll notice the difference in file transfer times. Within the walls of your building file transfers might be measured in seconds. Go outside and the same size files will require minutes.

A larger corporation might have a LAN backbone running 1000 Mbps between switches and perhaps even to the desktop. If your WAN connection is DS3 at 45 Mbps, you still have a substantial choke point for data entering and leaving the organization. It can be a significant bottleneck when running overnight file backups to a remote data center or transferring important files to a client. If your desktop computer is connected at 100 Mbps, the slowdown might be a little more than double. But if you are transferring between two servers that have 1000 Mbps connections, the slowdown to 45 Mbps is more like 20x.

So, why don’t companies just increase their WAN bandwidth to match their LAN bandwidth? The reason is cost. WAN connections have traditionally been very expensive. Management can rationalize that the company generates far more traffic across its LAN than goes out on the WAN, so that a slower WAN isn’t that much of an impediment. Well, that depends on what is entering and leaving the building. If customers can’t access your servers in a reasonable time, they’ll think your website is broken and go elsewhere. If your medical organization can’t transfer medical images in a reasonable time, staff might be tempted to shy away from electronic medical records.

Is there anything that can help this situation? Probably the most promising technology is Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet. Prices for Ethernet WAN connections are significantly lower in general than traditional telecom service pricing. Bandwidths that match LAN speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps are readily available at quite reasonable pricing.

With a better WAN to LAN bandwidth parity, network performance will be much more consistent, regardless of file source and destination. That can really help productivity and encourage staff to make better use of electronic file transfers and paperless office techniques.

What will it cost to improve your network’s WAN connection performance? Probably less than you might think. Even if you don’t match your LAN speed completely, you can likely get more bandwidth for your current budget. To find out how much, check Ethernet WAN bandwidth service pricing now.

Ethernet Domination

Someday in the not too distant future there will be Ethernet and only Ethernet. That's one possible, perhaps even likely, scenario that's popped up with the proliferation of Ethernet WAN services.

It wasn't that long ago that there was a choice in local networking technologies. Token Bus, Token Ring. But what protocol does nearly every NIC or Network Interface Card ship with today? It's Ethernet. The only question is one of speed. The interface could be 10, 100, or 1,000 Mbps with 10 Gbps soon to be widely available at reasonable prices. Local Area Networks are Ethernet structures. Most have gone to a subset, switched Ethernet, for full duplex operation. Coaxial cable has given way to twisted pair copper wiring and RJ-45 connectors. Copper is now being challenged by fiber optics.

What is driving standardization toward a single networking standard in the LAN is as simple as cost. Economy of scale means that once NICs, wiring, switches, routers and connectors are in large scale production, they get cheaper by the unit. Pretty soon other technologies are at a cost disadvantage and start to disappear. Lower volume production runs hasten their demise.

The LAN revolution is over but the WAN revolution is in full swing. Wide Area Networks started as analog dial-up and went to telephone company developed Time Division Multiplexing standards that are dominant today. But Ethernet is escaping into the Metro Area Networks and into long haul connections. MPLS networks hope to be the successor to the circuit switched model used for SONET and other TDM technologies. But even MPLS may be an intermediate solution. The dominant networking protocol could actually wind up being Ethernet end-to-end.

Is that possible? It is actually available right now for many businesses. Imagine connecting your office in New York with your offices in Los Angeles and Seattle in one very large network. Not just communicating from location to location by going through multiple protocol conversions. But connecting LANs together to transparently create a single large company network.

Ethernet transport services from intra-city to inter-state are available from competitive carriers who operate their own private regional and national networks. They are fiber optic based to offers bandwidths that include classic 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. As 10 GigE networks proliferate, that level of WAN Ethernet service will likely become available as needed. Larger service providers are now in the process of upgrading to 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps in their core networks to meet the rising demand for bandwidth, driven especially by video streams.

Here's another surprise. Even though Ethernet is the newer technology, it also offers a price advantage per Mbps of bandwidth. You could be paying less than half of what you are now for high bandwidth WAN connections. Would you like to know what the best offers are for your location? Find out now with an easy online Ethernet service search