Brigham and Women’s Hospital is recognized around the world for its outstanding reputation in biomedical research and its commitment to educating and training physicians, research scientists and other healthcare professionals. Brigham and Women’s Hospital is recognized around the world for its outstanding reputation in biomedical research and its commitment to educating and training physicians, research scientists and other healthcare professionals. Located in Boston’s renowned Longwood Medical area, the hospital’s commitment to patient care is unwavering.
When Brigham and Women’s was looking to build a patient monitoring network for the Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center, the “cardiovascular center of tomorrow,” the hospital turned to 3Com. Through 3Com’s partnership with GE Healthcare, which was hired to collaborate and build the network with the hospital, the hospital deployed the 3Com® Switch 5500 family of premium stackable switches and the Switch 4210 family of Layer 2 stackables to create the secure converged network it needed to ensure performance and reliability and keep patient information available.
In the Shapiro Cardiovascular Center, Brigham and Women’s placed the full range of cardiovascular services in a single building. The hospital says the technologically advanced center better supports “real-time communications between an integrated team of specialists and staff that can address each patient’s needs in a comprehensive manner.”
Few environments are as mission critical as a hospital— a network outage can put human lives at risk. That’s why Brigham and Women’s deployed the GE Healthcare CARESCAPE™ patient monitoring network running on 3Com switches.
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The Challenge
Most IT environments aim for five-nine reliability, which requires at least 99.999% uptime (or just five minutes and fifteen seconds of downtime per year). A typical business might be able to get by with less uptime. But a hospital is different. And Brigham and Women’s strives to lead the way in patient care and quality, which demands standards that go beyond five-nines.
“In a sense, failures are not tolerated,” says Michael Fraai, M.S, C.C.E, director of Biomedical Engineering for Brigham and Women’s. “There are more than 1,100 critical devices on the patient care network between the new Shapiro building and the existing Tower building. For us, it’s five-nines and above. If a switch goes down, you have no patient monitoring. As a result, nurses are working in the dark and you bring patient care to a halt.”
Fraai says that’s unacceptable when patient care is at stake.
The 3Com Solution
FAST RESTART
The evaluation process Fraai used was unique. He looked at three factors: ease of use, small footprint and legacy knowledge. Fraai says the 3Com switches are easy to set up and simple to operate. In addition, they take up less space in already crowded networking closets. Fraai also relied on his significant experience with 3Com products.
Because of his familiarity with 3Com, Fraai knew it had an advantage over the competition. He knew 3Com solutions offered better price/ performance, but he was focused on other 3Com benefits.
He zeroed in on a key capability of the 3Com Switch 5500 and Switch 4210—their ability to boot up quickly. “Price/performance analysis between 3Com and its competitors is significant,” says Fraai. “But the fact is, if part of our system goes down, I need to reboot fast. I don’t have three and a half minutes to wait. The system has to reboot and get back up and going fast.” Fraai says the reboot time of the 3Com 5500 and 4210 switches was faster.
The 3Com switches are a key to the reliability of Brigham and Women’s patient-monitoring. There’s redundancy in the stack of switches. “If one fails in the stack, it won’t take out the whole stack—like we might see in a different switch,” says Fraai.
Working with GE Healthcare, Fraai’s team also installed a network core on two different floors—one in the basement and one on the fifth floor. This enables the patient monitoring to continue even in the event of a power outage in one area of the building. In addition, because the 3Com switches run on DC power and fail over to an AC power supply, the switches run cooler, which prolongs their life—important in mission critical applications.
KEEPING QUALITY OF CARE HIGH
Even though it is absolutely critical, the network doesn’t require a large staff to manage. It’s just Fraai and a limited number of biomedical engineers. Despite that, Fraai looks at more than just numbers on a spreadsheet when he evaluates systems like this for his hospital.
“Businesses tend to look at how many of this, and how many of that,” says Fraai. “In healthcare, although cost is important, quality is a parameter we care about more.” Fraai says it doesn’t matter how many people are using a patient-care network. If it goes down, it’s a potentially fatal problem.
“Even if there are just five people using a patient-care network and it doesn’t work, you compromise care,” says Fraai. “The resulting cost from that kind of failure is immense. If somebody gets hurt, I don’t think there’s a dollar value you can put on that. It’s not about reducing costs—it’s about keeping the quality of care high. That’s the metric we focus on.”
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Courtesy of 3Com