This week, Level 3 Communications is joining healthcare and technology companies across the United States to celebrate National Health IT Week 2012, which places a spotlight on the critical role health information technology (IT) plays in improving care, increasing patient safety, reducing medical errors, and enhancing collaboration among healthcare providers.
Gone are the days when healthcare organizations could operate independently. Hospital systems must be interconnected with other healthcare providers as tightly as the individual departments within a hospital are linked together. Doctors from differing organizations are collaborating on patient care and research in ways that require highly integrated IT systems among various organizations. The same is true for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, as well as others in healthcare. Advancements in medical technology, such as electronic records and advanced imaging, coupled with an increasing focus on operational efficiency, are requiring this new level of interconnectedness among healthcare organizations. These trends, not to mention Hi-tech Meaningful use requirements, are driving them to share and consult on patient data.
At the forefront of this drive to share information is Shriners Hospitals for Children, a health system comprising 22 hospitals dedicated to providing pediatric medical care, world-class research and educational opportunities for medical professionals. The level of collaboration among Shriners doctors across geographic locations is extraordinary as they work together to care for sick children throughout the United States. To support ongoing collaboration, Shriners has implemented a fast, flexible and cost-efficient Wide Area Network that gives physicians in all of its hospitals nationwide near-instant access to patient data and critical healthcare applications.
The Shriners network enables physicians to review, quickly triage and respond to burn victims more efficiently, in real time, with increased network security, latency and reliability. By leveraging this network, they also support business continuity and disaster recovery while meeting meaningful use requirements. The network solution delivered by Level 3 has also helped Shriners reduce operational costs, providing a return on investment within 12 months and – more importantly — enabling them to allocate the savings to research and care for the children they serve.
This is the future of healthcare, and it’s happening today thanks to advanced data communications networks that are making this level of interconnectedness possible. We’re proud to be part of this quiet but critically important revolution in healthcare and we’re proud to be one of the many organizations celebrating National Health IT Week.
For more information about National Health IT Week, visit www.healthitweek.org.
To learn more about the outstanding work that Shriners is doing for children, visit www.shrinershospitalsforchildren.org, and thank you for considering supporting them with a donation today.
Check back to the Level 3 blog on Thursday, Sept. 13 as we dig into the IT infrastructure unpinning electronic medical records and health information exchanges.
About Karl Strohmeyer
