With more and more hospitals planning to store and access information in digital form, network performance and bandwidth have become important issues. For many, including Riyadh-based Dallah Hospital, a major network upgrade is an essential step in implementing a new information strategy.
Dallah Hospital is one of the largest private hospitals in Saudi Arabia, with an excellent reputation for quality healthcare. To promote even higher standards of care, Dallah Hospital’s vision is for every aspect of its business to rely on data in electronic form.
“As part of our plans, we realised that it wasn’t enough just to computerise information,” said Ahmad Al-Faqeeh, networking and information security manager. “For our patients to benefit, we also needed sufficient network bandwidth so that people could access this information wherever they were.” Dallah Hospital set out to increase the bandwidth of its network from 10/100MB to 1GB. It decided to base the upgraded network solutions on ProCurve Networking by HP.
“Having used HP’s products for many years, we had total confidence in the quality of its technology,” commented Al-Faqeeh. “ProCurve switches offered us excellent performance at a very favourable price and furthermore we can now easily make the transition to a ProCurve Adaptive EDGE Architecture in the future, should we wish.” Better service
Dallah Hospital installed one ProCurve Switch 5308xl and eight ProCurve Switches 2828, with ProCurve Manager Plus for network management. alfanar IT, a local HP partner, was responsible for site survey and installation. ProCurve Networking provides hardware support and has also delivered training. The most important application running across the network is Dallah’s Careware hospital information system (HIS).
According to Al-Faqeeh, the new network – which provides a hundredfold increase in bandwidth – is extremely fast. X-ray images, for example, appear immediately. This provides a marked contrast with the past, when the performance of the HIS was limited by network capacity and was often very slow
The reliability of the network has also improved greatly, along with management capabilities. On the rare occasions when there is a potential problem with a product, Al-Faqeeh claims that ProCurve replaces it immediately, as part of its comprehensive service and support offering, which includes a lifetime products warranty.
Together, these improvements translate into a better service for Dallah Hospital’s patients. Test results, for example, can be called up quickly by authorised medical staff anywhere in the hospital. Once the digitalisation process is complete, all the hospital’s information will be available over the network and hard copies will no longer be required.
“Our network is playing a vital role in supporting a whole new approach to information-handling at the hospital. We are convinced that ProCurve Networking was the right choice for us,” concluded Al- Faqeeh.
