Q&A: How Fallon revamped its network

When Fallon Clinic wanted to implement EpicCare, an electronic medical record application from Epic Systems Corp., the healthcare organization realized it would need to overhaul its network. Worcester, Mass.-based Fallon supports some 26 sites and up to 280 doctors throughout central Massachusetts and could no longer depend on homegrown methods and lightweight connections to keep the network up and application performance optimized. Susan Paul, the IT infrastructure director, recently talked to Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about the $1.5 million investment her organization made to revamp its network and where Fallon stands today.

First tell me a bit about yourself and your network at Fallon.

I am the director of IT infrastructure for Fallon. Fallon Clinic has about 26 sites scattered throughout central Massachusetts that connect back to our data center in Worcester. We have approximately 260 to 280 doctors who service those sites. Over the past three or four years we have been planning out an implementation of electronic medical record (EMR) application and as a result of that we needed to do a lot of bolstering of the infrastructure because it was pretty old and had been not well cared for, let's say, in the past.

What areas needed to be pumped up to support the EMR application?

We're a Cisco shop, and we needed to migrate from a shared hub to a switched LAN at each one of the sites. We upgraded with Verizon from a small frame relay connection, a 256Kbps connection to 10Mbps Ethernet-like transparent LAN service connection to each site. We also put in a full back up line to each site so if our primary lines went down the backup would take over. We installed new computers, and obviously we were bringing in new servers. I also recognized that we needed upgrade how we monitored service levels.

We have right now an SLA with Epicare for uptime of about 100%, and that's why we have so much failover. The Epicare server is clustered, so we have a disaster recovery site if that cluster goes down. As we were planning, I realized I needed to have in place a system that would provide monitoring, capacity planning, trending so that we would be able to understand problems were starting to happen before we got a phone call from a user that we had a problem.

What product did you implement to report on SLAs?

We put in software from Heroix about a year ago after an RFP process. We picked it because it was very easy to use. We selected it basically because it's ease of use, flexibility in configuration as well as flexibility in presentation and reporting.