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So the night before the acquisition became official, the health-care provider got Highsmith-Rainey Memorial Hospital in Fayetteville online with the ATM network, without tearing down the network. CFVHS took the increasingly popular, quick-and-dirty method of dropping in thin clients connected to Citrix MetaFrame servers. Five ATM switches were installed at Highsmith-Rainey, and CFVHS fired up the dark fiber it had recently purchased from a local utility to link the sites. "Between 7 p.m. and midnight, we had delivered [Wyse] Winterm terminals all over the hospital, and provided access to all our systems," Campbell says. "The key was being able to do this quickly. It was nothing more than preconfiguring five new ATM switches. And we didn't have to install any servers or set up large numbers of user IDs."

The MetaFrame-based servers, which run alongside NT Terminal Server in the same box, provide a centralized access point for the Highsmith-Rainey users without anyone having to reconfigure servers and PCs. But the downside is that hefty server power is required to do all this: CFVHS' MetaFrame servers are Compaq 6500s with 2 GB of RAM and multiple processors. And a MetaFrame thin client isn't geared for power users who like their own PC brawn, says Campbell. "This is mostly for telnet, HTTP and low-end office automation," he says. "The more resources you toss on MetaFrame, the fewer users you can get on it."

So power-hungry applications entering CFVHS' network, including radiology imaging and desktop videoconferencing, will use PCs instead to access NT Server-based servers at CFVHS' data center. "High-speed ATM has given us the ability to do this," Campbell says.

The MetaFrame solution is a short-term one for heavy applications like financial and inventory that reside on CFVHS' mainframes. But the thin client MetaFrame approach is in for the long haul for remote access from clinics and nurses' stations, according to Campbell.

Next on the agenda for CFVHS is merging the voice systems. "We have two separate voice switches between the two," Campbell says. "We are looking at voice over frame relay, voice over ATM and voice over IP using Nortel Networks' Unified Networks solution."

One of the key features of this integrated voice network will be "follow-me messaging," where physicians' and nurses' voice calls are routed to wherever they dial into the network for their voicemail. "We have a lot of roaming users. This way, the phone answers their PC," he says. The health-care provider will add software to its Nortel switches to handle this IP-based feature within the next few months, Campbell says.