St. Andrews Hospital Prepares for a Digital Future Providing the Foundation for Reliable and Highly Secure Health

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Melbourne, Australia – March 6, 2013 — Cisco Live! St. Andrews Hospital, a private surgical hospital based in Adelaide adjacent to the South Parklands, has selected a Cisco^® Medical-Grade Network (MGN), to develop the foundation for its digital future. The Cisco MGN is made up of an architecture and series of best practices, designed to support any application and any device. It enables an agile, flexible and dynamic networking environment.  The hospital has also implemented Cisco IP voice to facilitate communication and collaboration between surgeons, healthcare workers and patients.

The Cisco MGN at St. Andrews is an end-to-end networking framework, which enables integration and interoperability at functional areas, helping interactions among healthcare participants, processes, applications and hardware components. This encompasses areas such as campus networks, clinics, remote clinicians, and data centres. Diverse business and clinical communications are facilitated and integrated throughout the continuum of care.

“With rapidly changing trends in point-of-care health services, real-time consultations with specialists and e-health records, we need to ensure that our intelligent network platform can support these new technologies.  It had to be highly secure, resilient, robust, with high redundancy capabilities and able to meet the Hospital’s future business requirements,” said Peter Cooper, Director: Engineering & Support Services, St. Andrews Hospital.

By taking advantage of some of the most advanced technology available for specialist surgeons, healthcare workers and patients, St. Andrew’s Hospital is supporting its current and future vision for Service Excellence as South Australia’s leading private hospital.  

With its partners KPMG and Data Mobility Voice, St. Andrews Hospital deployed the network including Cisco Catalyst^® 3750-X Series Switches in the core, distribution and edge to support IP telephony and digital theatre environments. 

·      Leading the Way in Technology Innovation with Focus on Future Service Delivery.  The Cisco Medical Grade Network enables real-time, highly secure and reliable access to patient information, medical images and business-critical applications. This is a catalyst for delivering new services such as IP telephony to St. Andrew’s medical staff – enhancing the hospital’s reputation for service excellence and leadership. The flagship of Cisco’s fixed-switching portfolio, the Catalyst 3750-X Series, provides the high availability, resilience and network robustness required in networking for a medical environment.

“We partnered with St Andrews to help identify a robust digital solution for the hospital and believe that the Cisco MGN solution for St. Andrews will deliver significant benefits well into the future” says KPMG’s South Australia based Partner for Technology, Julie Wobber.

In the future, St. Andrews will explore even more patient-centric services delivered to the bedside such as self-service menus, entertainment and internet, also, enabling specialists and doctors with access to patient information, such as records and prescriptions, right at the point of care. Video streaming from operation theatres to university medical schools, IP-based video surveillance and digital signage will also be considered.

“St. Andrews Hospital is one of the most progressive medical facilities in Australia, adopting technologies that will help improve patient care, deliver the best in e-health services and provide a modern workplace that is amongst the best in the country,” said Ken Boal, director of Enterprise and Public Sector Business Group for Cisco Australia and New Zealand.

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