[CAnet - news] Optical Networks: The right Rx for Hospitals

For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical
Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html
-------------------------------------------


 [Here are a couple good articles from Lightwave about the advantages of
optical networks for hospital groups. Because of the high data demands of
medical imaging systems and the new HIPAA security/privacy requirements many
hospitals are acquiring their own fiber networks and deploying their own
optical equipment.  See
http://lists.canarie.ca/pipermail/news/2005/000085.html for more details.
Some excerpts for Lightwave articles -- BSA]


http://lw.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?Section=ONART&C=TOPST&ART
ICLE_ID=244940&KEYWORDS=WDM&p=13&pc=ENL

Improved interconnection among hospital groups not only results in improved
care but also reduces malpractice risk for hospitals, insurance carriers,
and physicians and lowers costs for insurance providers. For this reason,
many hospitals are deploying optical networks to satisfy the bandwidth,
security, and storage needs that better interconnectivity requires.

Traffic volume
Because the benefits are so substantial, many hospital groups are actively
deploying medical IT initiatives such as Picture Archive and Communications
System (PACS), Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), and Electronic
Health Records (EHR). The National Research Council has outlined some of the
healthcare applications that are enabled by improved interconnectivity among
healthcare professionals . These initiatives individually and collectively
require tremendous amounts of bandwidth between healthcare professionals.


Because the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA)
requires every physician's manipulation of an original image to be stored
and easily retrievable, multiple Gigabytes of data must be sent back and
forth on even the most modest of hospital networks. Only optical networking
can support the traffic volumes needed for the storage and retrieval of
high-resolution medical digital images. Many organizations try to employ
Internet Protocol (IP)-routed WAN solutions but find that they cannot
elegantly handle traffic volumes over 100 Gigabytes per day--a level most
hospital networks easily exceed.

Physical layer security
HIPAA also mandates patient privacy. WDM is a Layer 0/1 networking technique
that provides physical layer isolation of traffic streams. Higher layer
network architectures increase exposure to security risks.

Application transparency
Moreover, WDM is an application-transparent networking solution. Application
transparency allows hospital groups to deploy applications faster than with
application-aware networks. With transparency, there is less time-consuming
and expensive applications tuning and debugging--not just for the initial
deployment but for every subsequent software update (e.g., service packs,
bug fixes, version upgrades). The application transparency of a WDM network
minimizes IT costs for hospital groups.

Access to economic fiber
For most hospital groups, the vast majority of their traffic travels between
buildings within a metropolitan area, commonly a cluster of downtown
hospitals, suburban hospitals, ambulatory care centers, affiliated doctors'
office buildings, and the data center (See Figure 2. Since most of this
infrastructure is located within a metropolitan area, fiber is generally
accessible and WDM can be economically employed.

Storage system connectivity
Hospital networks also need to interconnect their backup data center, which
should be some geographic distance away from the primary data center. WDM is
generally uneconomical at distances greater than 300 km. Fortunately, there
are asynchronous database mirroring solutions that operate over long
distances with SONET services.

In summary, only WDM can support the traffic volumes and satisfy the
performance parameters that hospital networks require. Because they are
application transparent, WDM networks enable hospital groups to deploy
medical applications more rapidly and avoid the time-consuming tuning
required by alternative application-aware network architectures. And the
inherent security of WDM physical-layer isolation is more compliant with the
patient privacy concerns of HIPAA regulations.


----------------------------------------

http://lw.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?Section=ONART&C=TOPST&ART
ICLE_ID=244899&KEYWORDS=WDM&p=13&pc=ENL



Hybrid CWDM/DWDM networking, meanwhile, provides a compelling alternative
for healthcare IT departments seeking both affordability and scalability.
Two or four channels can be deployed initially via CWDM, and more channels
can be added incrementally and cost-effectively via DWDM as new needs arise.
Users also save on costs for staff training and equipment spares because
both CWDM and DWDM are deployed from the same platform.

Among the most important applications supported by WDM is business
continuity and disaster recovery across geographically dispersed data
centers. Sophisticated storage solutions enable a healthcare organization to
ensure that its data and applications are always available, even in the
event of simultaneous failure at multiple sites.

Recently, the security of traffic carried by these storage solutions has
come under greater scrutiny. Physical-layer intrusion detection, in which
the optical networking platform is programmed to shut down service or take
some other immediate, automated actions per level of signal degradation, has
emerged as an important capability. In-flight data encryption also has
emerged as an important last line of defense. WDM platforms can be deployed
in tandem with recently released appliances that perform native storage area
network (SAN) encryption without adding latency delay for sophisticated,
real-time applications such as 1-, 2-, 4-, and 10-Gbit/sec Fibre Channel or
FICON. Healthcare organizations, challenged by the high data-privacy
standards set forth in the Healthcare Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), find great value in these multi-layered
defense strategies.

These and other enhancements have led healthcare organizations to deploy
WDM-enabled optical networks. More and more hospitals, urgent-care
facilities, diagnostic centers, research universities, and other healthcare
institutions are turning to WDM to reduce network costs and enable virtually
"flat-lined" telecom expenses over a period of sometimes longer than five
years. Using WDM, healthcare IT departments can deploy and manage
state-of-the-art data, voice, video, and storage services more easily and
cost-effectively from the same optical networking platform.


-------------------------------------
To SUBSCRIBE:
send a blank e-mail message to
[email protected]

To UNSUBSCRIBE:
send a blank email message to
[email protected]
-------------------------------------

These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.



_______________________________________________
news mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.canarie.ca/mailman/listinfo/news