There are six branches located around Christchurch to provide both geographic and specialty cover across the city. CRG strives to provide top quality imaging services using state of the art equipment and proven techniques. This is supported by a real commitment to education and research.
The CRG challenge
“The ability of CRG to deliver high quality images in a timely manner to Specialist Radiologists around the city was limited by the speed and cost of wide area networking,” says Shane Reece, IT Manager for CRG.
As new applications were added and existing applications grew this challenge was becoming much greater. There was contention between radiology applications and centralised voice recognition servers that was going to require more expensive bandwidth and Quality of Service functionality. Added to this, service reliability was not always satisfactory which was a growing frustration to CRG and their IT integrator IBM.
Enable Networks solution
The solution to solve CRG’s problems was quite simple. Remove the bandwidth constraints and allow CRG to take control of their own network. We achieved this by connecting the five Radiology locations and CRG head office together using the EnableFIBRE point to point dark fibre solution. Shane used IBM to deliver the Cisco switches that operate the fibre at 1Gbps. At that speed all constraints on the critical applications as well as new applications were removed.
Having commissioned his new fibre enabled wide area network, Reece then opted to use the Enable fibre to connect to SNAP for high speed internet and the potential of high speed peering with other health organisations like Pegasus Health who are also on the fibre network.
Video conferencing is now run over the network between sites for continual medical education and this allows Specialists to participate in their own time from their place of work.
Benefits
“The Enable fibre network has given us autonomy and control over our network. Within our existing budget we were able to implement a more reliable and fast solution that has changed they way we deliver our services to our Radiologists,” says Shane. The network now provides Shane with more choice in terms of his communications and IT suppliers.
Where radiology images were once backed up painfully over night, this now happens in real time reducing risk of loosing images. There is now less reliance on remote servers which saves resources and future investment of up to $20,000 per site. The network has almost endless potential for growth with no increase in networking cost.
The internet connection to SNAP provides outstanding performance and internet peering provides options for virtual networking with other health organisations or suppliers at no additional cost.
“The EnableFIBRE solution has worked very well for CRG. It has been simple to implement and we have had absolutely no problems.”
