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Networking Challenges At The Texas Children's Hospital

It is hard to imagine a network environment more challenging or mission critical than a hospital, particularly one dedicated to the needs of children. But the Texas Children's Hospital, a 456-bed full-care pediatric facility in Houston, Texas, thrives on the challenges and relies on an FDDI and Ethernet network to help an estimated 2,500 users provide patients with the finest possible pediatric care, education and research. The hospital's four-building campus includes a Clinical Care Center housing ambulatory clinics, research facilities and information services; a West Tower housing critical care and surgical facilities, diagnostic imaging services and other departments; an inpatient facility known as Abercrombie; and a Support Services Building for administration. T1 lines link network users with remote sites such as a telemedicine clinic, a materials management warehouse and a disaster recovery center. ISDN is used to reach a nearby credit services bureau. To meet the demand for high-speed networking capable of transmitting diagnostic images, the hospital is migrating its network from two FDDI rings to seven in a switched and routed Ethernet environment and replacing terminals with PCs and Sun SPARC 10 workstations. The setup works well today -- so well, in fact, that the hospital's pioneering diagnostic imaging work has made it one of AFGA's three centers of excellence -- but future demands may prompt a move to Fast Ethernet or ATM. In the medical arena, software often dictates hardware and t his has resulted in an extensive array of platforms and protocols to satisfy the demands of clinical and business staff. It makes network manager Randy Cosby's job more difficult to keep tabs on "almost every protocol known to man" but he cheerfully adopts a "just say yes" attitude, within reason. 3Com is the hospital's primary vendor for connectivity from network interface cards to bridges, routers and hubs. 3Com products have also helped the hospital segment the network logically and tame 27 file servers, 3 minicomputers, 17 VAX systems, and a mainframe.

On The Road to Good Health The network has helped to eliminate x-ray films, process patient orders, provide telemedicine services and streamline processing of lab specimens, appointments, and pharmaceuticals. Looking ahead, the hospital aims to provide computer-based patient records and no doubt, it will succeed.

Randy Cosby
Occupation: Network Manager
Company: Texas Children's Hospital
Houston, Texas
Years experience: 19
Responsibilities: Responsible for the design, management and support of the Texas Children's Hospital campus network including host systems, workstations, routers, hubs and software.