Avaya network upgrade helps Sydney Adventist Hospital move to electronic health records

Sydney Adventist Hospital (SAH) has upgraded its network to support growth and deliver around-the-clock connectivity to doctors and other staff.

Sydney Adventist Hospital is a not-for-profit facility of the South Pacific Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, located in sunny Wahroonga, New South Wales. The acute-care private hospital has 358 licensed overnight beds and treats around 50,000 inpatients and 170,000 outpatients each year. The emergency department (ED) admits around 20,000 patients annually, making it the busiest ED of any private hospital in NSW.

SAH relies on its network being always available, so that doctors and other staff can access patient records and medical images any time of the day or night. The hospital runs its local area network on Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 modular core switches and ERS stackable switches. It uses a Virtual Private Network Gateway 3050 to give staff remote access to critical resources, and switch clustering to provide multiple links to all parts of the network.

SAH planned to replace paper-based patient records with electronic health records and network-enable its biomedical and clinical equipment. The hospital was also capturing and uploading data in real time for use by clinicians and medical staff with smartphone and tablet devices, all of which put pressure on its existing network infrastructure.

“We’re also expanding our facilities,” said Chris Williams, Chief Information Officer, Sydney Adventist Hospital. “By 2014, we will have several new buildings, with 200 additional inpatient beds and 12 operating theatres, as well as a new arrivals area, an integrated cancer centre and a teaching facility for healthcare professionals. We needed to update the network to ensure clinicians and other staff across multiple locations had access to patient records whenever required.”

To prepare for this growth and meet the increasing demand for bandwidth, SAH deployed around 5500 ethernet ports using Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 and 5000 Series switches. It is also upgrading its network with two Virtual Services Platform 9000 core switches.

“The solution provides our medical staff with network access around the clock and is really resilient,” said Williams. “The increased network speeds also allow hospital staff to quickly transfer diagnostic images to remote locations, and patients benefit from the wireless internet access.”

IT staff can also upgrade core network switches without scheduling downtime, while ‘plug and play’ provisioning allows deskphone users who are new or moving locations to be set up in minutes, without manual configuration.

“These capabilities significantly reduce time to service and increase uptime, as there’s no outage required for switch upgrades and replacements, or in the event of a switch failure,” said Williams.

“We can now provide internet connectivity to more doctors and other hospital staff than ever before,” said Williams.