A pioneer in electronic medical records since 1966, Concord Hospital relies on Avaya networking solutions to meet its growing bandwidth needs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with zero downtime — a critical factor so that patient care is not interrupted. Concord Hospital’s network supports data services for its main hospital facilities and provides access to approximately 100 external locations such as clinics, physician offices and medical imaging facilities.

The hospital and its affiliates use the network to streamline patient care with new digital information services such as computerized physician order entry; medication bar coding; anywhere, anytime access to radiology and cardiology images; and hands-free wireless communication devices.

To meet rising bandwidth requirements in its data center, Concord Hospital selected the Avaya Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 9000 for its network core. The hospital also added the Avaya VSP 7000 top-of-rack switch to its data center to simplify operations and deliver high performance switching with extremely low latency for critical server-to-server communications.

These solutions allow the hospital to support high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities today, and 40 and 100 Gigabit when required in the future. Avaya VENA Switch Clustering capabilities further enhance Concord’s network with true end-to-end reliability and active resiliency for always-on access. This enables the hospital to perform in-service maintenance and software upgrades in their network core while maintaining the highest levels of network availability, which is critical in a paperless hospital environment.

Concord Hospital’s ongoing investments in Avaya Network Solutions enables the hospital to easily update and integrate newer systems as needed without reengineering its entire network each time.

Avaya’s Platinum Partner for Concord Hospital is Integration Partners of Boston, a full-service voice and data network engineering firm which designs, implements and supports secure, fully converged networks.

This announcement highlights Avaya’s commitment to bringing The Power of We(TM) to every Avaya customer to help drive faster collaboration, smarter decisions and better business results.

"Concord Hospital’s goal is to provide the highest quality patient care and the highest quality outcomes for every person who walks through our door, and one of the ways we do that is through efficient use of technology. We consider the network a utility in the same critical category as electricity, oxygen and water — it needs to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with zero tolerance for downtime. We’ve been with Avaya for many years, and because of our strong emphasis on network capabilities, we’ve been early adopters of technologies that many other organizations are just getting into now. After very careful consideration, we decided to stay with Avaya’s networking solutions because we’ve found the equipment to be rock solid and saw no advantage to changing suppliers."

— Mark Starry, chief technology officer, Concord Hospital

Other IT news about Avaya