Santa Cabrini Hospital

PUTTING THE MOST ADVANCED
IT TOOLS INTO THE HANDS OF
TOP-NOTCH HEALTHCARE TALENT
Position Paper
Customer Experience 2.0
Case Study
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:
Santa 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 recommended 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.
“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,
Santa Cabrini Hospital
Benefits: This Nortel solution provides a “clinical-grade” network: a centralized
architecture with advanced features for a secure, cost-effective, resilient and highlyscalable infrastructure. Wireless mobility and communications are of critical importance 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 spirit
Angelo 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 application, 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 Engineering, and members of their teams, initiated discussions concerning a major network
upgrade with several vendors, including Nortel. Nortel had previously provided voice
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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 integrated
Two 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 management 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 understanding 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.
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 resiliency 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 electrocardiogram 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 productivity
Santa Cabrini’s new network is today running “perfectly, with no problems experienced,” Bodo says.
“The feedback has been
More significantly, he says, “The feedback has been tremendous, both from the
nurses and from the doctors.”
the nurses and from the
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.”
tremendous, both from
doctors.”
— Angelo Bodo, B.Ing.,
manager of Information
systems and telecommunications,
Santa Cabrini Hospital
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.
5
“Once you’ve put the
technology into the hands
of the staff, you can’t
separate them from it.”
— Angelo Bodo, B.Ing.,
manager of Information
systems and telecommunications,
Santa Cabrini Hospital
Moreover, a recent Tolly Group report (“Performance, Resiliency and TCO Comparison 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 communications infrastructure has the biggest impact. A great example is the newly introduced
PACS, which can be used on Nortel’s Clinical-Grade Network infrastructure, providing 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 infrastructure 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 technology 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 connecting 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.
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