HIMSS is a membership organization focused exclusively on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health. As part of its new membership status, Ciena will be exhibiting in booth #7205 at the HIMSS 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, February 12-15, 2006 in San Diego.

As the industry moves toward fully digital systems for clinical care, administrative and financial transactions, public health, professional education and healthcare/biomedical research, the volume and sensitivity of data for backup or on-going operations is growing and demand is increasing for time-sensitive access and backup to larger pools of information over longer distances. This trend is adding new pressures to these WAN environments, and healthcare enterprises are finding that traditional storage and networking technologies are not equipped with the necessary performance and reliability qualities.

Leveraging more than 12 years of engineering Layer 1 and Layer 2 networking platforms, Ciena brings carrier-class expertise to demanding healthcare environments with its Adaptive WAN solution, a wide area network that optimizes and switches traffic at the lowest possible layer to provide maximum throughput, flexibility, low latency and applications transparency. As a network that is always available, never drops packets and delivers deterministic response, Ciena’s Adaptive WAN moves healthcare organizations beyond overlapping, single-application networks to a unified, scalable and high-performance network that supports time-sensitive, mission-critical applications and business processes.

“Ensuring real-time availability of patient data, which compounds daily, and compliance with regulations such as HIPAA were key drivers for building an optical network infrastructure versus storing and backing up data locally,” said Alejandro Lopez, storage manager of UC Davis Medical Center. “With Ciena’s networking technology, we have increased our network capacity for continued growth and return on investment, gained operational efficiencies through consolidation of several storage platforms and applications onto one network, and guaranteed security for our applications.”

According to Albert Oriol, CISSP, Director of the IS Program Office and Privacy & Data Security Officer at The Children's Hospital in Denver, “With the deployment of the Electronic Medical Record organization wide, The Children's Hospital needed an effective disaster recovery solution that ensured availability of patient information to clinicians in the event of a disaster. Ciena's technology has enabled us to implement a remote failover architecture between our primary and secondary data centers that provides us faster recovery and a more cost-effective solution than traditional disaster recovery approaches. Ciena's storage extension technology has also been instrumental in building an infrastructure that will ensure we will not see a significant service interruption in our clinical systems while we relocate our primary data center from our current campus to our new state of the art hospital in 2007.” Instead of having clusters at each site, The Children's Hospital in Denver is using Ciena’s CN 2000® Storage Extension Platform to split clusters geographically across the network.

"With hospitals and healthcare facilities in seven states, our data centers reside in facilities that are hundreds of miles apart. Ciena's CN 2000 and ON-Center network management platform allow us to run multiple applications across more than 200 miles without suffering any of the usual pitfalls – network downtime, lost data or limited accessibility to patient information," said Bill Strutton of Trinity Health, based in Novi, Mich. As part of its disaster recovery initiative, Trinity Health is using Ciena's CN 2000 and ON-Center® Network Management Suite for storage, network and mainframe extension between data centers.

Several platforms in Ciena’s Adaptive WAN solution, including the CN 4200™ FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, the award-winning CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform, and ONLINE Metro™ Multiservice DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) platform, have earned qualification from major data storage specialists including IBM®, EMC®, Hewlett-Packard®, Hitachi®, McDATA™ and Brocade®.

“Healthcare organizations are ideal for our Adaptive WAN solution given their high volume of time-sensitive communications that require secure and reliable transmission between multiple sites and across long distances,” said Tom Mock, vice president of strategic planning at Ciena. “By joining HIMSS, we can work more closely with this industry to enhance interconnection among healthcare groups to improve patient care and clinical outcomes, help reduce malpractice risk, lower costs for insurance providers while increasing operational efficiency and better enabling regulatory compliance.”