As part of its telemedicine service, Mediacom Business has interconnected three hospitals and 21 clinics across 16 Illinois-based counties to its fiber-optic network.
Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH) is a not-for-profit health care system that primarily serves the Carbondale area of the state. The new broadband connection allows SIH’s 3,400 employees and medical professionals to share patient information and electronic medical records with healthcare facilities outside of their main location.
The telemedicine service allows medical professionals in remote rural areas to consult with specialists in real time during online examinations. It also all enables the sharing of diagnostic images and videos over a secure network.
“Prior to Mediacom Business, sharing data was really limited to just text-based. You couldn’t send images, you couldn’t really do anything that required a lot of data throughput, because the bandwidth just wasn’t there,” said Nathan Phoenix, manager of infrastructure systems for SIH. “Now we’ve advanced into telemedicine, which requires more bandwidth, because now we’re sharing video to show what’s going on with a patient remotely. There’s no other way to do it, other than using fiber.”
Mediacom Business has approximately 20,000 fiber route miles across its footprint serving businesses, schools and hospitals in rural areas across the heartland.
“The robust fiber network connections Mediacom Business provides across our 22 state footprint are enabling medical and educational institutions to fully engage in telemedicine and e-learning. It’s creating transformational experiences in the economies of the communities we serve, and in the quality of life for their residents. We’re especially proud of our partnership with SIH, which has allowed them to be a recognized leader in utilizing telemedicine to improve the level of healthcare to people throughout the region,” said Dan Templin, senior vice president of Mediacom Business.
Mediacom Business, the commercial services division of Mediacom Communications, offers point-to-point and point-to-multipoint services to businesses. It first started offering fiber-based gigabit services back in 2007 before renaming the platform “Gigabit+ Fiber Solutions” in the summer of 2013.
