NOC Boosts Bandwidth, Critical Operation Of Healthcare Network
By Karla Paris
Illinois Rural HealthNet (IRHN) selects network operations center to better manage statewide communications network and allow rural facilities to access medical applications and information in real-time.
With upgrades in diagnostic tools among rural hospitals and clinics occurring at a break-neck pace, the speed with which diagnostic images and data can be transmitted to specialists becomes increasingly important.
The Illinois Rural HealthNet (IRHN) is aware that time is of the essence in medical treatment and has chosen INOC – a 24×7 Network Operations Center (NOC) and global provider of NOC monitoring, reporting, and support services – to aid in the design and configuration of its latest fiber-optic network upgrade.
As a not-for-profit 501(c) (3) organization dedicated to the management of a statewide communications network exclusively for the use of health care providers, IRHN works with hospitals, health clinics, mental health clinics, educational institutions, and medical specialists. Funded in part by the Rural Health Care Pilot Program of the Federal Communications Commission, the IRHN provides the high-speed connection necessary to improve access to medical applications for rural hospitals and clinics.
Currently, there are more than 50 rural health care entities being linked to each other and to urban medical centers by way of the IRHN. The federally funded program is doubling the bandwidth speed of its 3,100-mile, fiber-optic network in order to provide a vital fiber link for an expanding community of health care providers, including rural mental health facilities, hospitals, clinics and practices, ambulatory care sites, acute care facilities, and more.
IRHN is continuing to leverage 24×7 NOC support and real-time monitoring to ensure critical uptime for its newly upgraded dark fiber network, wireless network, and other fiber-based services. This will allow IRHN efficient transmission of electro-cardiograms, CT scanner files, digital mammography files, and other diagnostic information.
Through its partnership with INOC, IRHN provides participating health care providers a reliable, secure, and high-performance network backed by 24×7 NOC support. The monthly cost for connecting an IRHN location to other IRHN locations ranges from $750/month for 100 Megabits/second, to $1200/month for 1 Gigabit. For traffic into the public Internet, ISP access is $4 per Megabit. For example, for $850/month, a hospital would have 100Mbps connection, upstream and downstream, to other IRHN hospitals, specialists, radiologist services, along with Internet2 and 25Mbps connection to the public Internet.
Source: Marketwired