Smart Network Automation Improves Patient Care

Kliniken Südostbayern in Germany chooses Allied Telesis Autonomous Management Framework for simplified network administration.

Customer:	Industry:	Location:
Kliniken Südostbayern AG	Healthcare	Traunstein, Bavaria, Germany

Allied Telesis has excellent quality network equipment, which is what our healthcare customers need. We recommend Allied Telesis most often to our customers because of their simple but clever network management tool, AMF. AMF allows centralized management of one, many, or all switches at once, and built-in automation further reduces administration overhead—this is one of our customers’ key requirements and Allied Telesis really delivers.

Siegmund Gromotka

CEO,

inducio GmbH

Kliniken Südostbayern AG (Südostbayern Clinics Ltd.) owns and operates six hospitals in Traunstein and in the Berchtesgaden County, Germany. Company headquarters are in Traunstein, which is also the site of Klinikum Traunstein (Traunstein Clinic), the group’s central hospital. A high-level specialist care hospital, Klinikum Traunstein is also a teaching hospital for both Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Paracelsus Medical Private University in Salzburg.

Klinikum Traunstein provides medical care for the city of Traunstein and the entire southeastern Chiemgau region. It has beds for over 540 patients, 22 wards, two emergency rooms, day clinics, and outpatient diagnostics and treatments that include oncology, neurology, and radiology. Attached to the hospital is the Bayerisches Rotes Kreuz air rescue center, where the Christoph 14 helicopter is stationed in a rooftop hangar.

Always-on Connectivity for Hospital Systems

With the need for hospital systems to be available 24 x 7, any effective hospital network must be easy to deploy, configure, manage, and troubleshoot, to minimize both the chance of downtime and the cost of administration. Automated network back-up with zero-touch recovery from equipment or link failure maintains uptime—this resiliency is the key to avoiding potentially life-threatening network downtime in the critical hospital environment. When Kliniken Südostbayern decided to redesign its aging networks, it was essential to achieve the very latest in state-of-the-art automation and management.

Allied Telesis Management Capabilities Lead the Way

The company began the modernization process by upgrading the network at its central hospital, Klinikum Traunstein. They turned to trusted partner, inducio GmbH, for help selecting the right vendor. inducio has an excellent reputation and strong history of helping healthcare clients to achieve their goals.

For inducio, Allied Telesis was the go-to choice of network vendor, thanks to the Allied Telesis Autonomous Management Framework^TM (AMF), an industry-leading scalable network management platform. AMF’s automated services, including firmware upgrades, backup recovery and zero-touch provisioning, minimize the resources and skills required to manage a complex healthcare network. As well as helping to ensure mission-critical network uptime, AMF’s centralized management enables administration of one, many or all devices at once, reducing the time, effort, and cost of management. A particularly useful feature for the hospital’s IT team is the management interface for authorizing network devices, which enables a simplified way to integrate new devices into the existing infrastructure.

Siegmund Gromotka, Managing Director of inducio, states: “Allied Telesis has excellent quality network equipment, which is what our healthcare customers need. We recommend Allied Telesis most often to our customers because of their simple but clever network management tool, AMF that provides centralized management of one, many, or all switches at once, and built-in automation further reduces administration time and effort. This is one of our customers’ biggest needs and Allied Telesis really delivers,” Gromotka added.

The Allied Telesis solution met all the hospital’s networking needs, including reliability and simplicity. “We could see that introducing AMF would achieve the critically important automated failure recovery, as well as drastically reduce our man-hours and operation and management costs. Plus, we were very impressed with the cost effectiveness of the Allied Telesis solution,” says Stefan Popp, Head of IT at Klinikum Traunstein.

Improved Hospital Efficiency Through Technology

inducio provided consulting during the design and implementation phases of Klinikum Traunstein’s brand-new converged network, built with Allied Telesis core chassis switches. The SwitchBlade x908 GEN2 delivers a future-proof core with superior flexibility, and stacking multiple units provides a strong backbone with no single point of failure. The high-capacity SwitchBlade x908 GEN2 effortlessly eliminates bottlenecks and ensures all of the hospital’s data, voice and video applications are delivered reliably, while AMF delivers real and immediate value by providing a network infrastructure that can be managed as a single entity.

Converging all the hospital’s services and systems—including the Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS) system, real-time inventory management, emergency call alarming, telephony, KIS (Key Information Summary) System, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and patient entertainment—reduces complexity and TCO. The powerful new solution ensures efficient hospital operation and provides staff with access to online resources from anywhere around the premises at any time.

The result is a superior solution from Allied Telesis, with network monitoring and management services provided by inducio.

Reduced IT Administration

The new, modernized network provides numerous benefits including AMF centralized management with automated backup, upgrade, provisioning, and recovery. Devices are automatically restored if they are replaced in the network bringing plug-and-play simplicity to network management.

“The network is stable and very reliable. It’s much easier to manage, thanks to AMF,” says Popp. He continues, “AMF ensures automation and intelligence which reduces administration, freeing up our IT staff for value-added technology projects—we feel very secure in the network’s reliability.”

Looking to the Crystal Ball

Allied Telesis partners with many healthcare providers all around the world to enable superior healthcare network solutions. Our innovative network technologies like AMF, enable networks that are resilient, self-managing, self-healing, and self-defending. As connected care continues to grow, Allied Telesis networking ensures that healthcare providers have the most secure and reliable solutions—enabling the best care for patients.

Allied Telesis looks forward to working with Kliniken Südostbayern to protect, modernize, and future proof all their hospital networks, ensuring always-on access to patient records and other online systems and applications.