HealthTechnica

Bandwidth Management for cost reductions – Shawn Riley

Posted by  in Tuesday, November 25th 2008   
Topics: Editorials    Tags: , ,
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  1. Bandwidth Management
    1. WAN costs are always a large chunk of a CIO’s annual operating budget. WAN requirements will only get worse for hospitals and medical centers as we implement more technology. EMRs, PACS, tele-medicine, e-patient, and Medical Home will all take an every increasing amount of bandwidth. A huge consideration must be taken regarding how to manage that bandwidth. Do you limit internet surfing? Do you stop email attachments? Do you block streaming audio/video? There are some tools on today’s market that can be a great help. Systems like Blue Coat’s Packeteer PacketShaper can be used to guarantee service for your different traffic types and make the most efficient use of your available bandwidth. The PacketShaper monitors and regulates data at layer 7. It allows for complete control over all applications that hit your WAN. Your IT staff will be able to ensure that only pertinent traffic is used on your WAN. Complete granularity is available with this tool. You can setup specific rules for different clinical areas or different divisions. The average cost of moving a 45mbps WAN link to a 100mbps WAN link is ~$65,000 annually. PacketShaper systems can be had for 25,000-35,000 as a one time cost. If you manage your traffic carefully, a PacketShaper can have a very short ROI while providing a higher service level for your clinical customers.

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