Kennedy Health System upgrades network to improve electronic records

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Getting the health care industry up to the “speed of business” has been a slow process for many hospitals, but Kennedy Health System announced today it’s taken steps to give its hospital the tools needed to keep pace with their patients’ and doctors’ needs.

Getting the health care industry up to the “speed of business” has been a slow process for many hospitals, but Kennedy Health System announced today it’s taken steps to give its hospital the tools needed to keep pace with their patients’ and doctors’ needs.

“People want information, and the expectation bar has risen a lot,” said Mike Archer, Kennedy’s vice president of network services. “Health care is no different from anybody else, but we do have some unique attributes.

Archer said because of the system’s increased use of digital medical records and imaging, as well as the need for more reliable connectivity, Kennedy Health Systems completed a network upgrade that connects five of the system’s locations to a fiber-optic network, including a data aggregation point in Philadelphia.

Archer said health care has always had “silos” of information: Each segment of the industry had its own records and images, and required paper and film to share that information with other providers.

“There has been a movement for all of those systems to converge, and the physician wants to open one screen, one portal and have access to all that information,” Archer said. “It’s so much more efficient; people get better health care because all of that information is given at the same time.”

But accommodating all of the information on one system has been taxing to the hospitals’ network. The network upgrade provides Kennedy with enough bandwidth for its current operations, and is “future proofed,” with additional space for when growth is needed, as well.

Archer said the time it takes to send images from one center to another has decreased dramatically on the back end with the new system.

Kennedy worked with Fibertech Networks, of Rochester, N.Y., to do the upgrade, and because Fibertech is a smaller company with health care industry experience, both the service and contract are flexible for future needs. Kennedy has a seven-year network provider contract with Fibertech that has milestones built in if additional services are needed down the line.

“We did it as a long-term contract that is strategic for us. We’re a nonprofit, so every penny we save we turn right back into something to improve clinical efforts,” Archer said. “It was important for us to build this, to fund it in a structured way across several years and being able to tier things up as we turn things on.”