Time Warner Cable Business Class is enabling OhioHealth, which a not-for-profit system of healthcare facilities based in central Ohio, connect patients and physicians with telemedicine services.
In addition to triple play services, Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) is providing OhioHealth with its 100 Mbps point-to-point Ethernet private line (EPL) fiber circuits to connect 50 care sites across the state. OhioHealth is also sporting TWCBC’s 300 Mbps dedicated Internet access at its headquarters and using speeds of up to 100 Mbps to connect to satellite offices.
The new speeds allow OhioHealth facilities to stream high bandwidth services such as two-way audio and video. OhioHealth has 11 member hospitals, more than 50 ambulatory and surgery centers, primary care and specialty practices.
“A patient and physician no longer have to be sitting together in the same room. A physician can provide evaluation and diagnosis through the technology that’s available today,” said Jim Lowder, system vice president, technology, OhioHealth. “Having a high speed, high performance, highly reliable, low latency network is absolutely critical to our operations. Time Warner Cable Business Class provides that network connectivity.”
TWCBC is also helping OhioHealth with requirements for system availability, disaster recovery and redundancy. TWCBC said OhioHealth had implemented a redundancy solution that features route diversity, separate entrance facilities and failover supported by a ring architecture.
Telemedicine is a burgeoning commercial service for cable operators and other service providers, but there are still some regulatory issues to be sorted out.
A year ago, Time Warner Cable Business Class launched a “Virtual Visit” telemedicine trial with Cleveland Clinic.
