Children's Hospital plans $25M IT investment

Tired of being hampered by its creaky, decades-old infrastructure, the Children's Hospital of Denver is investing $25 million to bring voice, video and data services into a single converged network. The project, which will connect the hospital's three campus locations, 11 Children's Care locations and 400 plus outreach clinics, was spurred by plans to move the hospital's main facility. By October 2007, Children's will be relocating to a 10 story, 1.44 million square foot building in Aurora, CO, and IT staffers are using the move as an opportunity to modernize and plan for the future. The move follows the hospital's existing effort to implement a system-wide EMR with technology from Epic Systems.
 
Among other upgrades, network engineers are implementing a fiber backbone throughout the new campus. This is a dramatic improvement over the current lines, which slow to half-duplex 10 MB/s in some parts of the hospital. Unlike the current hospital, the new facility will enjoy 100 percent WiFi coverage--as well as some outdoor service--through its newly-expanded network of 800 access points. Children's is also moving ahead with voice over IP calling for the first time, partitioning voice packets into their own virtual network for security and performance reasons. The installation, which relies on Cisco Unified Communications network gear, IP phones and wireless access points, is being done by Cisco channel partner Global Technology Resources.

Get more background on the Children's implementation:
- read this Healthcare IT News article
- check out the Children's release
- see Cisco's release on its role in the installation

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