This turns out to be a great accompaniment to the piece I just posted from Michael Finneran on Siemens' latest FMC announcement. I chatted last Friday with an end user in Ottawa, IL who's deploying OpenScape for a hospital/health care campus, and it makes a good case study in where much of the market--at least in the medium-enterprise range--really is at today.Curt Sesto is director of facilities, construction management and communications at Ottawa Regional Hospital and Health Care Center. Having read Curt's title, you won't be surprised to learn that he found himself, when he took on that title a year ago, managing a 14-year-old Siemens Rolm PBX as the core of his communications platform serving Ottawa Health's 600 users.
Most of those users are on a campus that includes a five-story hospital building, administration and medical office buildings, plus a new 6,500-square-foot mental health outpatient facility that's under construction. In addition, Sesto's staff serves facilities across town and in nearby Marseilles.
Dealing with an antiquated infrastructure, Ottawa Health focused its capital expenditures on a major re-cabling effort: "Before we even thought about the phone system, we had some housecleaning to do," is how Curt put it. They ran a fiber loop around the campus and pulled 350,000 feet of Category 6 cable, replacing wires that were Cat 5 at best and Cat 3 in many spots. They also upgraded to Power over Ethernet switches.
And as with any health care user, Ottawa Health wanted to significantly upgrade its wireless capabilities. They blanketed the campus with WLAN coverage, to free medical personnel from being tethered to their desks, and also to support a real-time location service implementation for tracking medical equipment.
Hand in hand with the infrastructure upgrade, Sesto and his management made a critical decision: Rather than implementing the CPE to support a new communications system, they decided to implement a managed service from Joliet, IL-based PosTrack Technologies.
"We were concered not only with cost savings, but the implementation, and also maintaining the system," Curt Sesto said."We've got some other issues we need to deal with. These are health care issues, and that's what we're here for." Issues like electronic medical records are much more crucial for the 9-member IT staff at Ottawa Health.
Curt said he got an inkling of what he could be up against in maintaining a system himself, when he visited health care enterprises comparable to his own. In one facility of roughly the same size, 2-4 staffers were needed just to run the IP-PBX, while Sesto has 4 members of his staff to deal with all networking issues including communications.
In addition, he heard various counterparts "talking about all their upgrades they've already done" on their systems--versions 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc. That sounded like a lot of time to be sucked into ongoing maintenance and version control.
The Siemens OpenScape platform they'll be using resides in a Level 3 datacenter in downtown Chicago, in space leased by PosTrack. They'll connect on a state-owned high-speed fiber network for healthcare and educational institutions, and they'll be backed up with bonded T1s for route-diverse failover.
It's too soon to know exactly how the cutover will go; over the next 2 weeks they'll begin moving to the PosTrack service, starting with 25 users before expanding to the rest of the users. Hopefully we'll get a chance to check back with them and see how it's going.
