Healthcare

Centralized Accounting in Healthcare
Customer Situation

A large health-care provider in Texas consists of four specialty clinics and an administration building. Two clinics offer surgical procedures and have a partnership with a local surgical provider. This specialty clinic stands alone with no competitors in the area and employees approximately 100 employees.

Previously, the clinic connected four sites to its hub site using ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI).   A couple of other locations had BRI connections to nearby clinics, and these clinics were then connected to the hub via BRI. This network was very clumsy and piecemeal.

Each of the locations operated autonomously. When a new CEO was appointed, he wanted to create economies of scale, cut costs, and improve productivity.

Customer Needs

The new management felt the system could benefit by implementing a centralized accounting system, which would improve efficiency and productivity. The new solution also had to meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations around improving patient privacy and sharing of patient records. The clinic staff also felt that the existing network was too slow and poorly designed.

Solution

The specialty clinic hired an IT professional who took on the responsibility to reconfigure the network. tw telecom presented them with VersiPak Virtually Routed Service (VRS), a Layer 3 private LAN extension that allows the customer to transfer private data between their multiple locations.

The health-care provider placed a 10 mbps VRS solution at its hub site along with standalone PRI for voice.   For Internet connectivity, they selected a 1.5 EIS solution.   All of the four outlying locations were provisioned with VersiPak VRS, consisting of seven business lines and 512 kbps VRS.

Benefits

The specialty clinic staff liked the solution provided by tw telecom. They expect to save 30 percent over what they paid for the BRI solution and are getting much more bandwidth. Also, the network provides a link from all the remote sites to the host at the administration site. The health-care provider will benefit from centralizing its accounting procedures today; in the near future they hope to also consolidate scheduling functions and have a single records management system. While not part of its current plans, the clinic staff is also considering utilizing the network for transmitting images, versus using the couriers, which today shuttle images to the various clinic locations.

With VRS, the health-care provider didn’t have a need for routers at each of the clinics.   This allowed them to cut capital costs as well as reduce time spent managing this part of the network.

 

Diagram