Santa Cabrini Hospital - StructuredWeb

Position Paper

Customer Experience 2.0

Santa Cabrini Hospital

Santa Cabrini Hospital is at the

forefront of the advancement of

information technology as a facilitator

of top-quality care in the healthcare

industry. As a result of deploying a

Nortel fully-integrated, end-to-end

solution, Santa Cabrini is running

voice over IP (VoIP), wireless data and

wireless electrocardiogram devices on

the same network and has built a solid

foundation for future applications.

In partnership with:

Case StudySanta Cabrini Hospital has deployed a fully-integrated, end-to-end Nortel

solution to help deliver to its patients the highest quality, most advanced

healthcare services available and, not coincidentally, to help attract the

best talent in every field of medical expertise.

Challenge: To attract the most skilled healthcare professionals in every discipline by offering them a hospital environment with the most advanced technology available — thereby offering patients the most excellent care possible.

Solution: Bell serves as Santa Cabrini’s primary solutions integrator and recom-mended a Nortel end-to-end solution. This solution provides a unified voice and data network that includes Nortel’s Communication Server 1000 for both traditional voice and VoIP, a Nortel WLAN 2300 series solution, along with the Nortel WLAN IP Telephony Manager that allows for integration of voice over WLAN while ensuring QoS capabilities. Nortel WLAN IP phones and wired 1100 series IP phones have been provided to staff in the hospital’s new emergency facility, with plans to soon offer them to staff throughout the hospital. Santa Cabrini is also now using Nortel CallPilot for unified messaging. The network includes Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s at the core, as well as Ethernet Routing Switch 1600s, 470s, 4500s with Power over Ethernet (PoE) and 5510s.

PUTTING THE MOST ADVANCED

IT TOOLS INTO THE HANDS OF

TOP-NOTCH HEALTHCARE TALENT

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Benefits: This Nortel solution provides a “clinical-grade” network: a centralized architecture with advanced features for a secure, cost-effective, resilient and highly-scalable infrastructure. Wireless mobility and communications are of critical impor-tance to Santa Cabrini, enabling more advanced services, greater efficiency and increased accessibility. Whereas in the past, staff would often lose critical time getting access to the various information systems and resources they require, today they have instant access to those resources directly in hand in the emergency room and at the patient’s bedside. This solution improves overall productivity at a reduced cost. But most importantly, it enhances patient care.

The administrators of Santa Cabrini Hospital in Montreal fully grasp the importance of recruiting the finest talent and deploying the latest reliable technology — and the critical interdependency of these two pursuits — in achieving their objective of providing the highest-quality healthcare possible. The most advanced technology — and, increasingly, the most advanced communications technology — is an extremely effective tool in attracting top-notch talent in the medical profession.

In today’s hyperconnected world — in which all modes of communications are being integrated for anywhere, anytime access — advanced information technology is for young medical professionals an essential element of their work and lives. They therefore quite naturally expect this technology to be woven into the fabric of their professional lives.

“My job,” says Angelo Bodo B.Ing, Santa Cabrini’s manager of information systems and telecommunications, “is to provide our staff with the tools they need and expect — to raise the bar on communications technology.”

Nortel is the company Santa Cabrini has chosen to facilitate this technology.

Innovative spiritAngelo Bodo came to his position at Santa Cabrini from the private sector, and he wanted to bring the same innovative spirit he found there to the healthcare arena. Santa Cabrini is among Canada’s premier hospitals, noted for its leadership in cancer care, and it needed an IT solution that would further enhance that reputation. The particulars of the delivery of IT services needed to be re-examined. For example, the potential for improving productivity with wireless communications hadn’t been sufficiently analyzed.

A network upgrade was in order, and quite a number of considerations needed to be addressed.

Wireless (Wi-Fi), no question, was to be of the essence in Santa Cabrini’s network transformation.

“We saw that having a wireless network would be an extremely important tool for the hospital,” Bodo says. “We began looking at how to deploy it most effectively, how to make it most productive and how to provide redundancy.

“It’s easy to bring in different wireless systems and technologies for each applica-tion, but to bring everything on one wireless system and make it run, and run well — that’s a great challenge. Once it’s working, it’s fantastic.”

But how would the hospital get there?

In 2005, Gnahoua Zoabli (P.Eng., M.Eng., Ph.D.), Manager of Biomedical Engineer-ing, and members of their teams, initiated discussions concerning a major network upgrade with several vendors, including Nortel. Nortel had previously provided voice

“We saw that having

a wireless network

would be an extremely

important tool for the

hospital. We began looking

at how to deploy it most

effectively, how to make it

most productive and how

to provide redundancy.”

— Angelo Bodo, B.Ing.,

manager of Information

systems and telecommunications,


3

solutions to the hospital, but when Bodo joined the team, he was aware that Nortel had plenty to offer for data (LAN), security and WLAN.

“We evaluated several vendors, and I knew that I preferred a vendor and partner who would serve as a one-stop shop — one provider for the entire solution. It’s just a whole lot easier to support when everything is coming from one vendor. With the same supplier, you’re much more confident in the reliability of the solution, confident that everything’s been tested together.”

“The primary things I was looking for were reliability, performance and the right features for our environment. Nortel was our choice.”

Nailing down the particulars of the solution became a joint venture between the hospital’s IT staff and Nortel’s sales and engineering teams.

Bodo took his staff to the Nortel labs in Montreal, and, he says, “The Nortel guys walked us through what their products and solutions can do for us, and we then had a clear idea of what we wanted them to do in our environment. But a good look into where Nortel is now headed helped us get a much clearer understanding of what we wanted to achieve and exactly how we would get there.

“So it was a merging of ideas.”

Fully integratedTwo Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s sit at the core of the network, while SMLT-enabled, “always on” high-resiliency, critical applications are connected to Nortel’s Ethernet Routing Switches with PoE (Ethernet Routing Switch 470s). The Ethernet Routing Switch 5510 sits at the access level (edge) for high-density Gigabit connectivity for patient imaging and archiving systems (PACS), including desktops.

On the voice side, Santa Cabrini is making a smooth transition to IP telephony with the Nortel Communication Server 1000 — a full-featured IP PBX that provides support for both traditional voice and VoIP — and a Communication Server 1000B (Branch Office) for IP telephony survivability. The new Nortel 1100 series IP phones are being used in the hospital’s new emergency facility, with plans to soon roll them out to staff throughout the entire hospital. The hospital also has deployed the Nortel CallPilot Unified Messaging solution in order to provide improved access and manage-ment of voicemail, fax with integration to the desktop and an email client.

Bodo said that this has been a very successful deployment thanks to the clear vision outlined by Vincent Gagliardi, Chief Financial Officer. The feedback and under-standing of the hospital’s needs provided by Daniel Alessandrini, from Telecom Services, was very useful to getting it right the first time.

The wireless solution is Nortel’s WLAN 2300 series, combining support for the latest industry standards with centralized management, architecture and advanced features for a secure, cost-effective and highly scalable WLAN infrastructure. The Nortel WLAN IP Telephony Manager 2245 is helping ensure voice prioritization for the Nortel 6140 wireless IP Phones on the wireless LAN. Mobile phones allow hospital staff to be more available to patients and to immediately access external parties, such as a patient’s family or physician.

The newly-introduced Mobile Dash Vital Signs Monitors (ECGs) allow patients to be moved — for example, from an operating room to a recovery room — without the risk of losing any vital signs information. Zoabli led the biomedical department

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Bell: A trusted, solid solutions integrator.

As the customer’s primary solutions integrator, Bell worked closely with the client to understand all the

requirements and their impact on staff, patients and the overall operations of Santa Cabrini Hospital.

Many criteria and factors were considered; most important were reliability, resiliency, security, performance,

ease of use and compatibility to other medical devices. Bell Professional Services experts worked with Santa

Cabrini’s IT team in reviewing the different vendors, technologies and options available on the market in

order to recommend the best, most flexible and resilient architecture. At the end of this extensive review,

they concurred with the hospital’s team that the right selection was to go with Nortel’s Business Optimized

Network end-to-end solutions.

“Bell has been an engaging and solid partner in providing Santa Cabrini with their best specialists to ensure

the smoothest possible integration of all the new technologies in the project,” says Nortel’s Ron Fuller, Bell

Enterprise Channel Leader. “Developing and executing this solution for Santa Cabrini Hospital involved the

expertise of many specialists; they provided the critical resources necessary for a successful project trial

and deployment.”

Implementing solutions in such a critical environment requires many certified resources in the fields of

network design [Ethernet LAN, WLAN (Wi-Fi)], VoIP, cabling and fiber design, and IT security. Bell provided

all the technical expertise with “Nortel Certified Design Expert” (NCDE) resources, as well as an outstanding

project management team.

Bell, Santa Cabrini Hospital and Nortel became a unified team, delivering successfully on their promises.

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Figure 1. Nortel - Santa Carbrini data and biomed setup

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involvement in this deployment, working in tight collaboration with Nortel and Bell to ensure that the mobile units would perform at their best, with security and resil-iency being absolutely critical. All this while operating on the same wireless network as the voice and data applications.

Bodo is also very pleased with the security provided by Nortel’s Security and VPN

solutions.

As a result of Nortel’s Clinical-Grade Network end-to-end solutions, Santa Cabrini is running wired VoIP, wireless VoIP, data, wireless patient monitoring and electro-cardiogram devices on the same unified network.

The deployment, says Bodo, was a smooth one — but challenging — given a very short timeframe of about a month and a half in order to meet the opening of the hospital’s new emergency facility. All new applications were delivered on time, with Nortel engineers on-site to assist throughout.

“The support from Nortel has been great,” says Bodo. “Equipment is always only as good as the engineers around it, and Nortel’s support has definitely been a differentiator.”

Enhanced productivitySanta Cabrini’s new network is today running “perfectly, with no problems experi-enced,” Bodo says.

More significantly, he says, “The feedback has been tremendous, both from the nurses and from the doctors.”

He says doctors — particularly the generation who’ve arrived accustomed to the most advanced in information technology — are coming to him for PDAs, or with their BlackBerries or laptops, asking about having access to the wireless network to use the applications delivered from their own devices, in order to use them at a patient’s beside.

“With the way our wireless is set up,” says Bodo, “we can do that.”

Such flexible access brings a number of benefits to patients: faster access to patient information, meaning quicker diagnostics, quicker treatment and thus a quicker recovery; access to x-rays and MRIs for bedside consultation purposes, improving

communications with the patient and other staff members; and the ability to access information online to help educate the patient regarding his or her recovery.

Santa Cabrini’s Chief Financial Officer, Vincent Gagliardi did an ROI assessment prior to this deployment, looking at productivity in terms of the number of hours that nurses and other staff could save by not having to constantly be traveling back and forth to a nurses’ station, for example, or for orderlies who transport patients in wheelchairs from one part of the hospital to another and then return for their next assignment. It was determined that integrated call notification and communications via wireless VoIP phones and devices would, quite literally, sometimes save lives, while also bringing significant savings.

“We’ve got to keep an eye on costs. We’re working to identify the cost of treating patients from the time they enter until they leave, and this technology is definitely helping improve services to patients while reducing those costs.”

Nortel has certainly helped the hospital save money. A January 2008 Info-Tech report (“Nortel vs. Cisco: LAN and WAN Infrastructure”) reports that Nortel’s enterprise infrastructure solution offers cost savings in the 27 to 54 percent range over that of its primary competitor.

“The feedback has been

tremendous, both from

the nurses and from the

doctors.”





Moreover, a recent Tolly Group report (“Performance, Resiliency and TCO Com-parison to Cisco/HP ProCurve Across Network Classes”) found that this solution is a greener alternative, in that Nortel’s PoE switches use considerably less power than those of the competitor.

But it’s in the provisioning of better care that this enhanced, converged communica-tions infrastructure has the biggest impact. A great example is the newly introduced PACS, which can be used on Nortel’s Clinical-Grade Network infrastructure, provid-ing doctors with quicker, more convenient access to critical patient information, right at the bedside. Immediate and reliable access to this information also reduces the risk of errors.

“Once you’ve put the technology into the hands of the staff,” says Bodo, “you can’t separate them from it. We’ve got to continue moving forward, and I’ve got the infra-structure to do that.”

Bodo points out that there’s considerable competition in Quebec to attract the most talented healthcare professionals: “The best doctors and nurses have their choice in Quebec about where they want to go to work. And if you don’t have the best tech-nology in place to attract and keep them, they’ll go to work somewhere else.

“We’re a nice sized hospital,” Bodo says, “not too big, not too small. That allows us to make choices very rapidly — ambitious choices — and to make aggressive changes to

meet the needs of our doctors and our patients.”

The decision to go with a Nortel voice and data solution was just such a choice.

“Technology is changing doctors’ entire approach to how they do their jobs,” Bodo concludes. “When they’re telling you ‘thanks for all these new tools,’ you know you’re doing your job right.”

And when everyone is doing their job right, the result, quite naturally, is exceptional patient care.

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel’s technologies are designed to help eliminate today’s barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and con-necting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.

For more information, contact your Nortel representative, or call 1-800-4 NORTEL or 1-800-466-7835 from anywhere in North America.

Nortel, the Nortel logo, Nortel Business Made Simple, the Globemark and CallPilot are trademarks of Nortel Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their owners.

Copyright © 2008 Nortel Networks. All rights reserved. Information in this document is subject to change without notice. Nortel assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this document.

NN123652-060308

BUSINESS MADE SIMPLE

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In Asia:Nortel United Square101 Thomson RoadSingapore 307591Phone: (65) 6287 2877

“Once you’ve put the

technology into the hands

of the staff, you can’t

separate them from it.”





Santa Cabrini Hospital - StructuredWeb

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