Providers are realizing cost-saving benefits of broadband April 27, 2007 by Scott Takac Nashville Business Journal (Link to NBJ Article)

Broadband technology is being employed more and more across business sectors and health care is no exception.

The term, derived from the words "broad bandwidth," describes high-speed data transfer capable of supporting full-motion, interactive video and several other applications.

Nashville-based Cybera Inc. specializes in broadband solutions for businesses nationwide and one of the company's target market segments is the health care industry.

To find out how broadband technology is impacting health care delivery, the Business Journal turned to Dan Glennon, Cybera's senior vice president of marketing and strategy.

What does your company do? Cybera designs and builds a highly reliable, private broadband network for companies and organizations with multiple sites. In a given region, you might have to work with BellSouth, AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, and various independent phone companies to get broadband service to all your sites. Because there is no single carrier that can offer service to every site, it would be ineffective for a customer to buy and manage the connections they need from each of these companies.

What benefits is broadband bringing to the health care industry? Broadband allows the advantage of new applications that save money or increase customer satisfaction or speed of processing. Whether it be a patient record or medical imaging application, videoconferencing or credit and debit card transaction processing, broadband allows these applications to result in better and faster service.

One of our customers operates retail eye care centers nationwide, and needed to upgrade their bandwidth to support a patient scheduling application. This saves them time and money. They could not have done this with dial-up - and it wouldn't be secure with just any broadband connection over the Internet. A private network helps ensure that patient information is kept secure and private.

What are a couple of the most innovative ways you've seen health care providers maximizing broadband? The use of broadband to facilitate telemedicine is really innovative, and can be used to help people get care even when they can't see a specialist in person.

Another major driver of course is in cost cutting, and many health care providers are integrating wireless access into their secure broadband networks to allow for mobile examination rooms where the instruments actually transmit data wirelessly into a patient's record. This saves time and increases the availability of patient information to the care providers that need it for diagnosis or patient care decisions.

How else is broadband saving health care providers money? Health care providers are responding to patient needs and moving services closer to where the patient lives and works. For some providers it often costs less to locate near a residential area and to specialize.

This is giving rise to new business models that emphasize customer satisfaction and fast service. Various retail examples in the market today include vision, cosmetic surgery and diagnostic services.
Total cost of ownership is one of the main benefits of a managed service. A lot of these retail-clinical establishments do not employ experienced IT staff to manage a complex infrastructure.

When you start adding the cost of provisioning network connections for multiple locations from multiple carriers, a managed service can save health care providers a lot of money.

How much does it cost to get linked on a broadband network? Cost is influenced by numerous factors including the type of access and speed needed, but in the market segment we focus on - clients with 25 or more sites - the cost is roughly $100 to $150 each month, per site.

© 2007 American City Business Journals Inc.