Ciena Solutions Gain Continued Momentum With Healthcare Institutions
LINTHICUM, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ:CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, New England's largest Catholic hospital, has deployed the CN 4200® FlexSelect™ Advanced Services Platform to optimize patient care through high-performance connectivity across its hospital and data center facilities in Connecticut. The CN 4200 platform is ensuring the rapid delivery of mission-critical LAN, voice and video traffic and real-time access to vital applications – including Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and disaster recovery and business continuity services.
The healthcare industry is going through a shift as new medical technologies and the move to digital record-keeping are placing increasing importance on the security and reliability of networks. In fact, according to a Hospitals and Health Networks Magazine survey, mortality rates are 7.2 percent lower in the "most wired" hospitals. A recognized IT pioneer, Saint Francis is one of only 5 percent of healthcare organizations in the U.S. that has fully adopted CPOE and bedside bar-code medication administration. Building on this commitment to innovation, Saint Francis recently built a private dark fiber network – instead of using leased lines – to maximize network control and increase patient data security, and also added a secondary data center for synchronous data replication and seamless disaster recovery. To optimize usage of this private network, the Hospital deployed Ciena's CN 4200 platform to provide a high-availability, low-latency networking environment to ensure seamless data backup and business continuity as well as on-demand delivery of bandwidth and storage-intensive applications between its main care facility and its primary and secondary data centers.
"At Saint Francis, we view IT as a cornerstone for improving patient safety and enhancing clinical care. Accordingly, as our medical teams and operations staff rely on an increasingly digital environment, it is critical that our core infrastructure supports the capacity and rapid delivery demands required to view, send and store patient data across multiple locations in real time," said Dave Cote, manager of telecommunications and network engineering at Saint Francis Hospital. "Through Ciena's CN 4200's unique, multi-protocol capabilities and software-programmable hardware, we enable our doctors to deliver superior care with a network that can rapidly deliver any service to any remote location and cost-effectively scale to meet new service, speed and capacity demands."
CN 4200 offers Saint Francis a secure, carrier-class network backbone with the flexibility to accommodate growing bandwidth requirements as service needs evolve. The Hospital selected Ciena's CN 4200 through the EMC® Select Program, which enables customers to easily acquire all required infrastructure components directly from EMC to complete storage solutions. By integrating the CN 4200 into its existing EMC environment, Saint Francis was able to extend its storage and replication applications outside of the data center, providing the connectivity needed to meet higher service demands.
"The CN 4200 strengthens Saint Francis' business continuity strategy by supporting a high-bandwidth, inter-site architecture for reliable access to remote storage of patient medical records, while enabling an economical next-generation healthcare network that offers the flexibility to support evolving applications and optimizes performance and costs in a controlled, secure environment," said Mike Aquino, senior vice president of global field operations at Ciena. "Our solutions offer major medical institutions and other enterprises the scalability, latency and reliability required to meet growing storage and capacity demands while guaranteeing the on-demand delivery of applications to ensure professionals have the information they need without delay or data loss."
A member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Ciena's solutions have increased network reliability at healthcare institutions nationwide, including Children's Hospital Boston, Iowa Health System and UC-Davis Medical Center, offering high-bandwidth transport and storage connectivity with flexible optical and Ethernet networks that extend the reach of time-sensitive, mission-critical data out to remote sites for access and backup.
About Saint Francis Care
Saint Francis Care is an integrated healthcare delivery system established by Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center. The Hospital has been an anchor institution in North Central Connecticut since its founding in 1897 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Chambéry. Licensed for 617 beds and 65 bassinets, it is one of the largest hospitals in Connecticut and the largest Catholic hospital in New England.
About Ciena
Ciena specializes in the transition to service-driven networks. We provide flexible platforms, intelligent software and professional services to help our customers use their networks to fundamentally change the way they compete. With a growing global presence, Ciena leverages its heritage of practical innovation to deliver maximum performance and economic value in communications networks worldwide. We routinely post recent news, financial results and other important announcements and information about Ciena on our website at www.ciena.com.
Note to Ciena Investors
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-Q, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 5, 2008. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
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