Blazing a Trail Toward the Future of Healthcare Delivery
Industry: Higher Education & Healthcare
Practice Area: Enterprise Networks
A leading healthcare provider and a university joined together as partners to create a vision for a forward-thinking approach to healthcare education. The plan was to build a private school of medicine to be located on a state-of-the-art campus in New Jersey. Based on an innovative team-based training curriculum, the partnership was designed to produce exceptional physicians who truly understand what drives health and disease. By integrating technology and systems into their thinking and practice, the goal was to improve the health outcomes of patients.
Challenge: Creating an advanced campus for learning, health science research, and discovery
Working closely with both the medical center and university stakeholders, Aspire took time to understand their collective goals and shared vision for leveraging the latest technologies to build a highly secure, digital learning and care environment. The challenge was to create a smart hospital design based on a converged IP network with the ability to:
- deliver the intelligence, security, and manageability required to take healthcare to the next level
- integrate with other existing healthcare facilities across multiple campus sites
- support a learning environment that works seamlessly with healthcare applications and medical devices
- help ensure data security and compliance with regulations like HIPAA, FERPA, and other standards
Solution: A future-proof foundation to improve the faculty and student experience
Aspire combined their internal engineering expertise with Cisco’s market-leading technologies to deliver a high-performance solution providing secure access to learning resources and clinical data, multi-campus connectivity, and enhanced collaboration capabilities. The design featured a network built to support growing traffic demands; wireless connectivity for faculty, students, and medical devices all with the appropriate levels of access and security; a Unified Communications (UC) platform; and simplified manageability for administrative IT staff.
Results: Helping to deliver the vision
The Aspire solution resulted in the following outcomes for the partnership:
- A network providing a foundation for innovative student learning that’s always on and accessible
- Ability to extend real-time communications across campuses to enhance collaboration and allow teams to work more productively
- Student and healthcare information safeguarded with integrated security to maintain compliance and minimize risk
- Simplified management and greater network visibility to maintain consistent standards and ensure a superior learning experience
