Brocade Helps Singing River Health System Transform Care Delivery

Singing River Health System, a healthcare provider in Mississippi and Alabama, faced a significant challenge in delivering superior patient care by sharing clinical information among hospitals and community medical clinics over a high-performance, reliable network. The need for a robust and reliable network was underscored by the experience of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the region and highlighted the importance of disaster recovery solutions. The organization began to redesign its IT network, data storage, and backup capabilities to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. In addition, a plan was developed to support the growing bandwidth demands of its Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical images, analytics, and mobility. As clinical data, images, and video continued to increase and strain network bandwidth, response time, and network uptime, Singing River executives realized that their goal of seamless sharing of clinical information among hospitals, clinics, and physician offices required upgrading the health system’s IT infrastructure.

Singing River Hospital is the 415-bed flagship of Singing River Health System, which serves patients in southern Mississippi and Alabama. The health system’s 2,600 employees and 300 physicians provide centers of excellence in heart, cancer, neuroscience, women’s and children’s and rehabilitation health. In 2012, Singing River went live with an Epic EHR that included computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and linked it to its existing radiology picture archiving and communication system (PACS), cardiology PACS, and robotic pharmacy to better support the continuum of care. Over the years, the network has transformed from having 25 servers and no switches to more than 700 servers and state-of-the-art switching.