Children’s of Alabama Case Study

Overview

Healthcare systems are focusing on delivering more personalized care, expanding their eco-system of providers, and adding connected medical devices and other IT tools to their digital environments. Connected medical IoT devices and health monitors, as well as smartphones and tablets used by clinicians to access electronic medical records (EMRs), are constantly communicating with the network. Reliable networks are needed for these devices to work and for clinicians, providers, and patients to interact with information quickly. In this increasingly complex environment, healthcare IT leaders are now faced with managing distributed IT systems efficiently and cost-effectively, all while ensuring data security and conforming to HIPAA requirements. The challenges of having to grow, scale and innovate has large medical facilities, like Children’s of Alabama, re-imagining their future IT infrastructures.

Challenges

Children’s of Alabama first came to DC BLOX with a need for resilient Internet access. They sought a secondary provider with a geographically diverse route from its primary provider from the hospital. If an outage occurred, then having another Internet connection would allow critical communications to continue, and there would be no disruption to patient care.

Also, Children’s was faced with how to best reach their new EMR provider, EPIC Systems. They needed a private network connection to EPIC’s data center and once again, needed to provision new circuits back to the hospital. The IT leadership team was finding that connecting an increasing number of external services to a growing hospital campus was getting too complicated and expensive. Children’s wanted to streamline the costs of direct and redundant network access to all the systems the hospital needed to externally connect to.

Another challenge being faced by Children’s was that IT had to reserve scarce hospital space for their IT equipment while leaving room for future growth. IT space often stayed dormant, and securing space meant negotiating with different hospital departments who needed it for other important functions. The condition of having limited IT space applied to all of Children’s facilities including over 20 pediatric and outpatient clinics across Alabama. Children’s needed flexible space for their IT systems, both inside and outside the hospital, to meet specific immediate needs and to have the scale to grow over time. To start, Children’s needed a place for equipment that was outgrowing its space at a nearby surgery center. Children’s wanted a data center with impeccable security, networking, redundancy, and infrastructure resiliency.

Before talking with DC BLOX, Children’s considered leveraging a nearby data center that was built for use by a local enterprise. Although the hospital Board approved the decision to use the building, the cost to bring it up to standard, and maintain it, was very expensive and out of budget. They still needed to connect to a multitude of partners, locations, applications, and devices which is always time-consuming and expensive especially when local providers don’t have the direct connections
needed. At the time, there wasn’t a tier III data center provider nearby that could meet Children’s needs.

“I don’t have to worry about the last mile anymore. Are providers on our street? Is there enough space in the conduit? Where are the entry points?”

Bob Sarnecki

Ultimately, the real value of what DC BLOX delivered to Children’s turned out to be much more than originally envisioned.

Bob Sarnecki, Chief Information Officer at Children’s Hospital of Alabama, wanted to set up Children’s for success for the long term. The DCB-CX would provide future IT advantages for the hospital and a new way to reach their EMR. DC BLOX arranged with EPIC to connect their networks, so over the same two redundant connections to BHM1, Children’s can leverage the Connectivity eXchange for Internet access and to connect to EPIC. The complexity of having to bring in so many multiple circuits and digging new fiber back to the hospital campus is gone.

Also, Children’s is no longer faced with the problem of having to build or maintain its own data center. They can move equipment from their hospital and any of their more than 20 associated clinics, surgery centers and physicians’ offices into a nearby DC BLOX facility designed to Uptime Institute’s Tier III Standards and reduce or eliminate the need to maintain valuable space in the hospital to house IT systems. Featuring N+1 power and cooling redundancy, DC BLOX’s Birmingham data center ensures the resiliency of their systems. BHM1 is highly efficient, secure, and interconnected, providing an access point on the DC BLOX Connectivity Exchange so that Children’s receives private network access to dozens of carriers built-in to DC BLOX data centers across its footprint, regional Internet Exchanges, public cloud providers, and any entity connected to DC BLOX’s network. DC BLOX backs up its reliability with a 100% SLA on power and cooling and a 99.99% availability SLA for network services to ensure the hospital’s infrastructure is always available to support its patients.

“We designed our core network architecture around DC BLOX. It’s
the foundation for how we are planning to build out the rest of our environment. We are moving more things into a scalable, redundant environment that we couldn’t do ourselves without tremendous expense.”

Bob Sarnecki