Zayo Logo

Zayo’s Infrastructure Supports UCHealth’s Advances in Patient Care

Blog

Advancing Patient Care Technology

Hospitals are going digital with patient-focused services ranging from telehealth to high-definition medicine. But these technologies are bandwidth-intensive, and security, reliability and latency are critical when lives are on the line. UCHealth — a top-ranked hospital and healthcare provider in Colorado — is on the front line of healthcare with a high-performance, highly secure network.

Now it’s taking the next step by rolling out new virtual tools and mobile apps to provide better value to patients. UCHealth has facilities across Colorado, including Denver, Fort Collins, Longmont, Loveland, and Colorado Springs. Its commitment to patient outcomes is evidenced by its inclusion in Watson Health’s Top 15 Health Systems for 2018, which ranks the nation’s top-performing health systems.

Not content to sit on its laurels, UCHealth is continuing to evolve its commitment to patient care by improving the end-to-end patient experience. This commitment to ‘live extraordinary’ includes technological advances that will make this vision a reality, including virtual way-finding and telehealth initiatives.

The Challenge

UCHealth previously partnered with Zayo to connect eight tier-one hospitals with a dark fiber ring, which expanded its bandwidth by a factor of 40 — and enabled services such as HD video. It also leveraged Zayo’s colocation services to provide low latency and redundancy on EMR and ERP systems. And, with a new, private wide-area network, designed and implemented by Zayo, UCHealth is now in a position to deploy advanced healthcare solutions, including real-time HD medicine and telehealth services.

But with a focus on providing end-to-end patient care, healthcare professionals don’t have time to worry about access to the right patient information when critical decisions must be made. They need to securely connect to the network and easily access and share electronic health data in real time — while keeping patient needs front and center. “It’s all about the patient and their individual journey,” said Manny Rodriguez, Chief Marketing Officer of UCHealth. That’s why UCHealth needed a connectivity provider that excels in network infrastructure solutions the same way UCHealth excels in patient care.

The Solution

Continuing its partnership with UCHealth, Zayo designed and installed a Private Dedicated Network (PDN) to provide connectivity across locations on dedicated fiber, with the ability to scale. By choosing to deploy a PDN, UCHealth gets all the benefits of a private network — security, scalability and dependability — without the burden of owning and operating the network infrastructure. Dedicated fiber provides the highest level of security, and the dedicated platform is customizable, scalable and secure. “Zayo’s PDN solution offers a fully managed private network with dedicated fiber that solves for both scalability and security,” said Craig Hollenbaugh, Vice President of IT with UCHealth.

The PDN also supports UCHealth’s virtual and mobile initiatives, including the UC Virtual Health Center, which includes a Virtual Intensive Care Unit that provides continuous clinical evaluation of patients. Other initiatives include My Health Connection, an Epic patient portal used to schedule visits for non-emergency conditions; Safety View, a remote patient monitoring program for patients who suffer from confusion or have safety needs; and virtual systems to monitor patients who have suffered strokes or cardiac conditions.

Results: Ready for the Future

Leveraging this connectivity, UCHealth is able to deliver on its commitment to evolving the end-to-end patient experience. It’s also well positioned to support the evolution of other exciting healthcare initiatives in the works and meet the challenges of delivering medical care in the 21st century — all while helping patients ‘live extraordinary.’