Health services provider bridges four centres with Wi-Fi

Winner of the Primary Health Service of the Year 2010 Victorian Public Healthcare Awards, Inner South Community Health Service (ISCHS) is a major provider of health and community services in the inner southern region of Melbourne. Servicing a catchment of 190,000 people, ISCHS’s work spans the continuum of prevention, early intervention and long-term management delivering specialist expertise in working with highly marginalised groups.

Formed in 1993 through an amalgamation of health centres located near each other, today, ISCHS incorporates four health centres located in Prahran, South Melbourne and two in St Kilda.

“Key to providing timely and accessible health services to its clients are the speed and reliability of communications between the four service centres,” says Mike Diamond, ISCHS Business Support Services Manager.

ISCHS has implemented wireless links for the four sites over the last six years. The technology delivered a satisfactory service in the early years but over the later years reliability was compromised due to increased demands on the bandwidth - with dropped connections occurring too frequently. This was due to additional staff and notebooks, more bandwidth-hungry applications supporting growing administration requirements and a number of new e-health initiatives.

But modern administration needs and a growing client base was stretching the organisation’s network.

“Managing our client records alone was putting enormous pressure on the network,” said Diamond. “We had the capacity but did not have the necessary speed to meet all our daily commitments.”

Additionally, communication between the disparate sites was a challenge where voice contact between the four centres required local calls to be made as each was treated as a separate site rather than a handset extension of a central head office. This was cumbersome as well as costly.

“The imperative was to ensure that our backbone, as the communication heart of our organisation, did not miss a beat. We also needed some serious consolidation and centralisation of all our digital and voice communication requirements - including the associated hardware,” Diamond says.

Diamond was driven by three main considerations: the need for network high capacity between sites to meet the needs of increased traffic which the previous wireless WAN could not deliver; low latency to enable faster inter-site communications enabling VoIP applications (and in the future video); and faster speeds with more capacity at a lower cost base than carrier services were offering.

Diamond and his team explored what upgrade options were available to the organisation (which is dispersed over a 6-kilometre radius) in order to improve communications. ISCHS settled on a Ruckus Wireless point-to-point topology put forward by Dycom Wireless Solutions, a Ruckus partner.

“We were impressed during the pilot phase at how cleanly the network performed. We measured throughput carefully and there were no latency or packet loss issues, critical to us as we were looking to deploy VoIP between the sites. Additionally, there were no interference issues,” says Diamond.

The system deployed consists of ZoneFlex 7731 wireless bridges in point-to-point configurations for ISCHS’s multisited wireless WAN. The old PTP wireless links were then redeployed as redundant backup links.

The proof of concept became a reality when all the links were replaced with wireless bridges and performance increased at a higher level than predicted by Dycom’s engineers. According to Diamond, latency across the three ‘hops’ (links) between each community centre is a 3-millisecond round trip.

Diamond says the solution offers “better throughput, the ability to centralise the management of the network, enabling us to reduce the number of fileservers, and the new functionality allowing free calls between the sites,” says Diamond.