SAN JOSE, Calif., March 2, 2010 — Brocade® (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced that Melbourne Internal Medicine Associates (MIMA), the largest and most comprehensive independent physician group in Brevard County, Fla., has deployed an end-to-end Brocade network to connect two data centers and 17 distributed facilities that support hundreds of physicians and staff.
As a result, MIMA has successfully reduced its time to process and run medical applications by more than 90 percent. Physicians are now empowered with 24x7x365 real-time access to patient medical records, reducing unnecessary travel and courier time to retrieve confidential information.
“All of our staff, physicians, and treatment centers need immediate access to patient data no matter where they are located or what time of the day it is,” said Gary Wright, chief information officer for MIMA. “This makes performance and reliability paramount for us. We have lives ultimately depending on our network and cannot afford slow connections or intermittent access. To this day, we’ve never had a second of downtime with our Brocade network.”
Organizations in the healthcare industry rely on various applications to run everything from general business processes to specific medical imaging and diagnostics. The integral component responsible for advancing or hindering these applications is often the networking infrastructure. MIMA is no different in that a majority of its network traffic and performance needs are linked to critical applications that enable physicians and staff to perform a wide range of daily tasks.
“With our previous network infrastructure, we had certain applications that took several hours to process critical tasks,” said Wright. “Through technology based on the Brocade BigIron RX switches, we were able to link multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports together into 20 and 40 gigabit links. This provided us the necessary bandwidth and boosted our performance, which immediately cut key application time down to minutes and allowed us to support more locations and patients.”
Powering the edge of MIMA’s network are Power over Ethernet (PoE)-enabled 10 GbE Brocade FastIron SuperX™ switches, which provide a unified network infrastructure and high-performance connectivity to hundreds of dispersed physicians, staff and patients. MIMA has migrated hundreds of traditional phones to Voice over IP (VoIP), powered with full Class 3 PoE. This approach leverages a single unified communications infrastructure to help reduce operating costs and expedite telephony user adds, moves and changes.
“Our previous phone system became way too cumbersome and expensive to operate,” said Wright. “We needed a new solution that not only provided easy deployment and advanced features but could grow with the business. With all of the benefits an IP-based solution could offer, such as cost savings and integrated voicemail with email features, we knew it was the right direction for us.”
