Cisco Unified IP Phones 7900 Series

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Pocono Medical Center in Northeastern Pennsylvania is a small regional hospital but manages the patient load of a big city medical center. Situated in a popular resort area, 65,000 patients a year visit the hospital's emergency room-often more than 200 per day-making it one of the busiest in the state.

Pocono Medical Center is highly regarded for delivering excellent patient care, but in 2001 the hospital leadership decided they could do better. They felt that reliance on manual, paper-based systems was preventing the hospital from greater efficiency and could eventually impede its capability to provide a high standard of care.

"Traditionally, patient information was always tied to the paper chart," says Marian Moran, vice president and chief information officer for Pocono Medical Center. "We realized that to get the most value from that information, we needed it to be virtual instead of being tied to a specific location. Instead of having a single paper record that could only be viewed by one person at a time, we needed to be able to view patient information anyplace, anytime, wherever caregivers needed it."

Moran felt that adopting more modern clinical data and communications systems could deliver benefits throughout the medical center. Instead of a system where clinicians had to page each other and wait for a response, Moran wanted to create an environment in which physicians, nurses, and support staff could communicate instantly, and deliver the appropriate care more quickly and safely.

In the hospital's busy Emergency Department, Moran believed a networked digital records system could eliminate the need for patients to move through several different steps-front desk, registration, meeting with a triage nurse-before they could be treated.

"We wanted to have caregivers go to the patient, instead of the patient going through a succession of caregivers," she says. "We wanted to bring everyone involved in the care of that patient directly to the patient, and have the system be patient-focused instead of procedure-focused."

Moran also believed that an updated technology environment could improve the medical center's profitability. For example, HMO patients had to go through several administrative steps before they could be discharged from the hospital. Occasional communication breakdowns, such as administrators not being at their desks when an insurance company called to confirm a discharge, could result in patients having to stay an extra day in the hospital. This resulted in a significant revenue loss. Streamlining clinical and administrative processes would also mean freeing more beds so the hospital could treat more patients.

Moran knew that updating the hospital's systems carried potential risks. If the new solutions didn't have the highest level of security and reliability, they could risk compromising confidential patient information, and even put patients' lives in jeopardy.

Moran and Pocono Medical Center's leadership decided to overhaul the hospital's data and communication systems. They had an aggressive plan to upgrade the hospital's aging network infrastructure and deploy a new, high-speed wired and wireless network to support a suite of modern healthcare technologies, including an electronic medical record (EMR) system, a picture archiving and communications system (PACS), and other clinical tools. Moran and her team reviewed several options but chose to deploy a Cisco® Medical-Grade Network, built on a wired and wireless infrastructure from Cisco Systems®.

Cisco Medical-Grade Networks are designed to address the life-or-death requirements of healthcare providers. Medical-Grade Networks provide secure 24-hour availability, use embedded intelligence to triage information and enhance efficiency, and integrate partners and the full range of healthcare applications to provide end-to-end connectivity.

"The two areas that were most important to us in expanding our systems were reliability and security," Moran says. "When we looked at what the industry standards were for those issues, we just felt that Cisco had the best solution. We also thought Cisco had one of the best solutions in the industry for providing redundancy, which was very important to us. We felt the Cisco solution would give us the near 100 percent uptime we needed."

According to Joe Palma, network administrator for the hospital, Cisco also offered more scalability for supporting future tools and applications.

"When we looked at all the different vendors, Cisco just seemed to have the most functions and versatility for doing the things we wanted to do," he says. "The pricing was also very competitive, and it seemed like we were getting a lot more bang for our buck versus some of the other systems we looked at."

The versatility of a Cisco Medical-Grade Network became clear while the upgrade was still in the planning stages. The hospital had previously used a third-party wireless telephony system in a few areas, and Moran wanted to extend it throughout the hospital by adding more proprietary access points and phones. But in working with Cisco, the Pocono IT team soon realized that they could easily carry wireless IP telephony over the Cisco wireless access points and network infrastructure they were already deploying to support data services, and eliminate a substantial deployment cost. The hospital moved ahead with the Cisco voice solution, eventually deploying 120 wireless IP phones, supported by more than 100 Cisco Aironet® wireless access points throughout the facility.

The wireless access points also enable clinicians with wireless laptops and handhelds to easily access the EMR solution and other applications from anywhere in the hospital, including a patient bedside. Having clinical information at clinicians' fingertips throughout the medical center enhances the efficiency and accuracy of the care they can deliver.

To protect confidential patient information and control access to the network, Pocono Medical Center uses a variety of Cisco security solutions, including Cisco PIX® security appliances and Cisco VPN concentrators. The VPN concentrators provide basic, secure remote connectivity for hospital physicians, but also support "teleradiology" and remote transcription services, and enable vendors and partners with authorized access to securely interface with the hospital network.

"We had to be able to rely on our data getting where it needed to go in both the wired and wireless environment, but we also had to make sure that the security and encryption techniques were up to the highest standards," says Moran. "We're very confident in the Cisco solutions we have in place."

"The Cisco firewalls and VPN concentrators are the cornerstones of the public face of our network," adds Palma. "To their credit, they're doing very well. We've had minimal problems with viruses or other security issues."

The Cisco Medical-Grade Network and the solutions it supports have helped transform Pocono Medical Center, enabling much greater efficiency and communications among clinicians and administrators, and enhancing overall quality of care. Today, clinicians collect and access information about patients through a streamlined EMR application, accessible anywhere in the hospital over the wireless network. New information instantly becomes part of a universal record that is immediately available to authorized users throughout the hospital.

This streamlined, virtual clinical environment has had a huge impact on how patients receive care. In the Emergency Department alone, average turnaround time for new patients has lessened from about four and a half hours to less than two hours. Pocono Medical Center has used new clinical and administrative tools to deliver faster, more responsive care, and patient satisfaction scores have been rising steadily.

Communication among clinical staff also has improved dramatically thanks to the ubiquitous wireless telephony solution. Instead of relying on someone to respond to a page for information, clinicians now use their wireless IP phones to contact each other directly and get an immediate response.

"Whether clinicians are on the floor, in an office, or on a break in the cafeteria, they are immediately accessible to the person who needs to reach them," says Moran. "We've gained huge efficiency as a result, and gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback."

"A lot of the ancillary and support departments are using the wireless IP phones now as well," adds Palma. "The Respiratory Department, Ultrasound, Radiology, patient transporters, maintenance staff-just about every department has the phones or is in the process of getting them. It's making everyone more efficient. It has become a huge productivity tool."

The remote connectivity supported by the Cisco VPN solution also helps physicians to work productively from an offsite medical center, a remote clinic, or even a home office. Today, if the hospital needs an emergency consultation with an on-call physician, the physician can simply log on to the hospital network, for example from a home office. With a secure, encrypted VPN connection, physicians can instantly view real-time lab results, patient charts, and radiology images. This technology not only helps improve quality of care, it also helps increase physician satisfaction and helps the medical center attract and retain top clinicians.

The Cisco Medical-Grade Network has helped contribute to cost savings as well. Because the Cisco switches and wireless access points support Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), the medical center didn't need to use separate power supplies for each wireless access point, saving tens of thousands of dollars over alternative solutions. The hospital has recovered substantial revenue by eliminating delayed patient discharges. And Pocono Medical Center also saves money on translation services. Instead of paying a translator to go to the hospital, the medical center now uses the wireless IP Communications system for conference calls between patients, clinicians, and certified translators.

Despite the scale of the wired and wireless infrastructure, managing the solution has proven to be relatively easy, thanks to intuitive Cisco IP telephony and wireless management tools, as well as the advantages of having a Cisco platform across the network.

"We've exponentially increased our equipment inventory, more than doubled the nodes on the network, but my management hasn't really increased," says Palma. "We were able to put in this whole infrastructure without changing our headcount at all, which I think is tremendous."

In the coming months, Moran plans to continue building on the Cisco Medical-Grade Network. At the top of the list is a bedside bar-coding solution that will be supported by the wireless infrastructure. By spring 2005, all prescriptions will have bar codes, and all clinical staff will use wireless bar code readers on mobile carts to scan drugs before administering them. The solution will help ensure that clinicians have the correct drug, the correct dosage, and the correct patient.

Pocono Medical Center also has begun construction on a new $50 million facility expansion. Instead of adding a new PBX phone system, Moran plans to support all wired and wireless telephony with a Cisco IP Communications solution.

Cisco Systems has helped healthcare organizations worldwide transform their clinical and administrative operations, and enable new efficiencies that benefit both patients and staff. To find out how Cisco can help your organization, contact your local account representative, or visit www.cisco.com/go/healthcare.

This customer story is based on information provided by Pocono Medical Center and describes how that particular organization benefits from the deployment of Cisco products. Many factors may have contributed to the results and benefits described; Cisco does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.

CISCO PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some jurisdictions do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties, therefore this disclaimer may not apply to you.