Lightpath, the business telecom services arm of Cablevision Systems Corp., has added another hospital facility to its lengthy list of customers. Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan has chosen Lightpath to be its primary provider of voice, data and Internet services.

Lenox Hill becomes the first hospital in Manhattan to which Lightpath is providing advanced telecommunications services. Lightpath already serves 36 major hospitals throughout Westchester County and Northern New Jersey, as well as 95 percent of the hospitals on Long Island.

Lightpath built a Sonet-based private optical network to interconnect the hospital’s four facilities and carry its voice, data and Internet traffic, at a significant cost savings for the institution.

“Our hope was to get the price/performance metrics we were looking for, and we did,” said Lou Ajamy, vice president/chief information officer at Lenox Hill Hospital. “When the network was built and our first facility lit up in 45 days, we knew we had made the right choice.”

Lightpath’s network includes redundancy throughout the entire network, with each location having dual fiber entrances and redundant network components. In addition, the redundant access network rings connect to physically diverse paths on Lightpath’s metropolitan area network, each of which has separate central office locations and redundant 5ESS voice switches, which are both located outside of Manhattan.

The network will also enable Lenox Hill Hospital to deploy other applications. Among these are the Hospital’s new clinical information system, a centralized system that can be accessed by doctors located in any of the Hospital’s facilities, and a digital radiology imaging system, so doctors can review X-ray films and MRIs on computer monitors at a patient’s bedside.

Lightpath had 2002 revenue in excess of $160 million, and more than 140,000 access lines and 18,000 Internet circuits.