Business Profile

Haukeland University Hospital, iHelse.net

Headquarters: Bergen, Norway
Web adress: www.haukeland.no
Industry: Medical; iHelse.net is a health care network of hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and dentist offices.
Project leaders: Jan Eirik Olsen, network manager, and Trond Sthre, manager of IT infrastructure
Size: 10,000 end users, with 5,000 workstations; iHelse.net includes approximately 70 locations in southwestern Norway, 12 of which use Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN
Technology in focus: Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN

Business challenge: Haukeland University Hospital had 256Kbit/sec frame relay lines between points on its WAN, but the hospital wanted to create a telemedicine network. Southwestern Norway, a sparsely populated, mountainous region, has few medical specialists in relation to its size. The medical digital-imaging system Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) could produce radiology scans as digital files, but the project would also require storage and WAN links with beefed-up bandwidth capacity. Frame relay and ATM links could provide the bandwidth, but not at an appealing price. Other options appeared limited.

Solution: Centralized storage of PACS images reduced expenses at external locations on the WAN; iHelse.net invested those savings in bigger WAN pipes and hardware storage equipment for Haukeland University Hospital. Negotiations with local service providers yielded Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN for less money than iHelse.net was paying for frame relay. Haukeland University Hospital already used Gigabit Ethernet on the LAN, so the project essentially extended the LAN into the WAN. Hardware and IT staff are now centralized, enabling Haukeland to decentralize MD brainpower and offer medical resources throughout the region, regardless of topographic barriers.

Some offers you just can't refuse: a $100 speedboat at a Miami police auction, any proposal from the Godfather, and 4,000 times the amount of bandwidth you're getting now for the same price.

The iHelse.net health network, part of the Haukeland University Hospital medical center (www.haukeland.no) in southwestern Norway, sought to maximize its medical resources through telemedicine, and it got a chance when it rocketed from 256Kbit/sec frame relay to Gigabit Ethernet on its WAN. Telemedicine maximizes doctor availability by relying on fiber optics to connect geographically distant participants in a virtual doctor visit. Specialists perform long- distance diagnoses to patients with high-resolution digital radiology images, which enables iHelse.net administrators to ensure that isolated locations receive competent medical attention. IT makes it happen through centralized storage, Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN, and local cache at the many endpoints in the health network.

Project leaders at iHelse.net at first merely intended to upgrade the $600-per-month, 256Kbit/sec frame relay lines to something with a little more breathing room, on the order of 10Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec. When the paperwork settled, however, they had negotiated 1Gbit/sec connections for $500 a month that standardized both the LAN and the WAN on Ethernet. iHelse.net was suddenly in the enviable position of deciding what to do with a wealth of bandwidth, and health care in the region vaulted headfirst into the future.

Pay For Access, Not For Bandwidth

Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) dig fiber optic cable like parents buy shoes for their kids-they leave plenty of room at the toe. Land costs and labor hours inhale most fiber-dig dollars. With large volumes, the fiber itself is an incidental expense. So, while you've got the dirt excavated and the trench open, you lay a lot of cable and make your money back selling dirt-cheap bandwidth.

When bandwidth is inexpensive, a service provider can attract customers by offering lots of it. The service provider can then invite customers to incorporate high-bandwidth WAN links into their businesses. According to Jan Eirik Olsen, network manager at Haukeland University Hospital, "You should pay for access, not actual bandwidth, because with fiber you have available bandwidth, especially when you use Wavelength Division Multiplexing WDM."

Lucky for Olsen and iHelse.net, a service provider in the area agreed. Trond Ovreeide at Merkantildata, a company that provides infrastructure equipment and consults with new service providers on how to develop telecommunications in Scandinavia, says his company's message is to give customers ample bandwidth to encourage adopting value-added services. Today, you make money on access, he says, but tomorrow's access will be commoditized, and services will generate revenue. "Give them 10/100 or Gigabit access, and instead of shaping them down, give them this access as much as it's available," Ovreeide says. "Tell them that they're running through a shared network, but if there's capacity, they'll get it."

Merkantildata worked with a service provider called ElTele Vest, the telecommunications arm of a Norwegian hydroelectric utility collective, to provide iHelse.net with Gigabit Ethernet for the WAN. ElTele Vest has fiber infrastructure in the region and capitalizes on surplus capacity by renting out bandwidth to regional businesses, often as a Multitenant Unit (MTU) play.

The Profile

Olsen and IT infrastructure manager Trond Sthre oversee iHelse.net's IT component, which extends to 70 locations in southwestern Norway, with 10,000 users and over 5,000 workstations. Spanning medical disciplines, the health network includes psychiatric institutions, dentist offices, and physical rehabilitation centers, along with local hospitals.

After Haukeland University Hospital and iHelse.net discovered they could reap significant savings by centralizing digital imaging storage, budget planners agreed to invest the money in the WAN. "Having savings in hand was one of the major forces behind upgrading to 100Mbits/sec," says Olsen. "Originally, our goal was 100Mbits/sec, but when we got the answers, we saw that they had the same price for Gigabit-exactly the same price. So why not have Gigabit?"

Centralize To Save

Every project needs a reason. At Haukeland University Hospital, that reason was Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), a medical digital-imaging system essential to the hospital's telemedicine rollout. Hospital administrators wanted to standardize the archiving of radiology scans and medical documents on a digital format that regional health care institutions could share efficiently. By consolidating the images on storage systems in one centralized location, and by setting up local cache at dispersed points in the WAN (as opposed to multiple locations maintaining separate storage), iHelse.net administrators realized they could save $1.5 million in storage costs. Redundancy is good for transmission lines, but needlessly redundant storage isn't the model of cost-effectiveness.