Bandwidth Options for Healthcare Providers

By: John Shepler

Electronic health records, medical imaging and telemedicine are making broadband connections an essential part of healthcare operations. Let’s take a look at what’s needed for today’s EHR environment.

There are two types of bandwidth services that you’ll want to consider. These are private lines and the public Internet. Both have their place.

Private lines are used by all sizes of businesses and organizations for internal communications. The fact that these lines are “private” means that they are not used for communication with the public at large or anyone not directly connected into the network.

Physician and hospital groups may well have large amounts of electronic data that they want to keep in-house under strict access control. Think of private lines as a way to extend your network.

Point to point private lines include such familiar options as T1, DS3, SONET OC3, OC12 and OC48, Ethernet over Copper and Ethernet over Fiber. Each of these options gives you a fixed amount of bandwidth that is dedicated to your use only and is inaccessible by anyone else. They differ in the technology to implement the service and the amount of bandwidth available.

For instance, T1 lines have been around forever, are available just about anywhere you can get a phone line installed, are highly reliable and are very reasonably priced. What’s not to love? The bandwidth is their limitation. While 1.5 Mbps was considered high speed in the days of dial-up modems, 1.5 Mbps is entry level broadband today. You probably won’t want to wait around for the time it takes to transfer large files with both text and images.

You’ll find a good discussion on healthcare provider bandwidth needs on the Health IT. gov site. The minimum bandwidth recommend for a single physician practice is 4 Mbps. That’s enough to support practice management functions including email and web browsing, plus simultaneous use of electronic health records (EHR) and high quality video consultations. It also is enough for non real-time image downloads and remote monitoring.

A small physician practice with 2 to 4 physicians will want to move up to 10 Mbps for the same functions. The extra bandwidth assumes more than one physician using the service at a time. The 10 Mbps level is also considered suitable for nursing homes and rural health clinics.

When you consider the needs of a clinic or large physician practice with 5 to 15 physicians, the bandwidth requirements increases to 25 Mbps. A hospital will need 100 Mbps and a large or academic medical center really needs 1000 Mbps.

The FCC publication “Health Care Broadband in America” goes into more detail about what drives bandwidth requirements. An Xray is about 10 MB and needs 60 seconds to download at 1 Mbps or 5 seconds at 16 Mbps. An MRI at 45 MB needs 72 Mbps to download in the same 5 sends or 300 seconds or a full 5 minutes at 1 Mbps. A 64 slice CT scan at 3 GB needs 4800 Mbps for a 5 second download or 80 Mbps for a 5 minute download time.

As you can see, there is a tradeoff between the amount of bandwidth you have and how long it takes to transfer files of various sizes. I’d suggest taking these requirements as a minimum, as the report was published in 2010 and technology is only getting more sophisticated with larger file sizes.

In addition to the bandwidth of the line, there are other technical parameters to consider. These include whether the service is symmetrical (same upload and download speeds), dedicated to your use only or shared between your practice and other users, the latency or time delay in transmission, and the amount of jitter and packet loss. All of these are quality of service metrics.

Dedicated private lines are almost always symmetrical, with low values of latency, jitter and packet loss. You can bond T1 lines together to increase bandwidth from 3 Mbps up to about 12 Mbps. That’s important for rural practices where there may be few other options. In metro areas, DS3 offers 45 Mbps, OC3 is 155 Mbps, OC12 gives you 622 Mbps and OC48 is 2.4 Gbps. These are all delivered over SONET fiber optic carriers.

Alternative landline services include Ethernet over Copper with bandwidth from about 3 to 50 Mbps, depending on location. Ethernet over Fiber service starts at 10 Mbps and goes up to 10 Gbps, with service to 40 or 100 Mbps in select areas.

Dedicated lines are also popular for connecting to the Internet to get the highest performance available. You don’t have the same level of control of what’s actually traversing the Internet, but it does have offer nearly universal connectivity.

For Internet access, you also have the option of option of connecting via shared bandwidth services. Popular options are DSL, Cable, satellite and 3G/4G wireless. Generally, these are asymmetrical, with higher speeds on download than upload. Also, they are offered on an “as available” basis without any service level agreement regarding availability, bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss.

The tradeoff in performance between the dedicated and shared services is that the shared services are for using the Internet and they are considerably less expensive. Internet security doesn’t begin to measure up to dedicated private lines, but it can be made workable using encryption such as VPN and SSL at each end.

The best solution for many practices may be a combination of private lines and Internet service. The Internet is valuable for communication with patients at home and using mobile apps, and also to establish WiFi service for visitor use. Private lines are beneficial for high speed communication between medical facilities and physician offices.

Is your medical practice running out of bandwidth in today’s EHR environment? You may be able to afford much more than you think with multiple bandwidth options and providers available at your location.

Voice and Data Bandwidth for Hospitals

Hospitals and medical centers need massive amounts of electronic communications infrastructure to operate efficiently, so to speak. With advances in imaging technology and the move to electronic records, this need could grow perhaps exponentially. Is there any way to keep the rising cost of health care in check with this kind of demand for every increasing telecom needs?

You bet there is. First let's take a look at what types of capability are required. Along the way, we'll see what we can do about the costs.

The most basic need of any organization is telephone voice communications. In any facility with more than a few phones that most likely means a PBX phone system. The Private Branch Exchange has come a long way over the years and may now sit on a shelf or in a rack rather than occupying an entire room. Even with legacy equipment, there is major cost savings to be had in consolidating a dozen or two analog phone lines into an ISDN PRI digital trunk running on a T1 line. If more than 23 outside lines are needed, additional T1 lines can be installed, usually by plugging them into an interface card in the PBX.

It should be noted that ISDN PRI trunk line prices have plunged in recent years and that competitive service providers may be able to provide the same level of T1 service that is currently being used at a lower price. Or for the same budget amount, telephone capability can be expanded to meet a growing need.

For greenfield installations or retrofits, IP PBX systems are popular. They perform the same function as the traditional PBX in being an in-house telephone exchange. The big advantage is that the IP PBX supports VoIP handsets. T1 lines carrying ISDN PRI digital telephone service work just as well for an IP PBX. But you also have the option to employ the newer SIP trunking to keep everything in the VoIP realm. That can translate into potentially large additional cost savings.

The other high demand technology within hospitals and medical centers today is data communications. The combined requirements of high definition imaging equipment, such as XRAY, CAT and PET scanners along with medical records access and normal purchasing activity means that getting information into or out of any facility requires a fairly large "pipe." A T1 line may be adequate for smaller satellite offices or a doctor's office. But larger organizations are needing DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps or fiber optic connections starting at OC3 or 155 Mbps.

Like digital voice lines, data communication lines have come down in price the last few years. Competitive service providers may be able to offer a considerable cost savings by simply replacing high cost line services with equivalent services from lower cost providers. But the real excitement comes from the new Carrier Ethernet networks. Carrier Ethernet is a technology that is now competing directly with SONET fiber optic service with savings as high as 50% or more in some cases. Carrier Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet, offers bandwidths starting at 5 Mbps and easily going up to 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and even 10 Gbps. The higher the bandwidth, the greater the savings per Mbps over traditional fiber optic services.

If you are responsible for hospital, medical center, or doctor's office telecommunication expenses and would like to see how much you could be saving on your monthly voice and data line bills, find out quickly and easily with our GigaPackets bandwidth evaluation service. You may be astounded at the results.