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Sitka Community Hospital
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"We try to provide professional service and help the patient out. That’s what Alaska Communications has done for us and has made it possible. "

— Mike Jackson with Sitka Community Hospital

Location

Sitka, Alaska

Industry

Healthcare

Customer Needs

  • Reliable, private and secure data network for the fast transmission of radiology images to L48 based radiology provider
  • Reliable Network infrastructure that supported current needs but would accommodate future growth and regulatory  requirements
  • High bandwidth, synchronous / full duplex internet connection
  • Guaranteed Quality of service
  • Visual communications at the desktop level for radiology consultations

Results

  • Better care for patients now and in the future.
    • A reduction of radiology transfer times of more than 70%
    • High uptime and high availability
    • A long term business relationship further strengthened
    • A Network ready to accommodate future growth needs for the hospital
    My name is Mike Jackson I am the IS Coordinator at Sitka Community Hospital. We’ve been here for over 50 years and with ACS for over 50 years. We have around 180 employees and we have around 9,000 people that we’re providing healthcare for in Sitka. We try to provide professional service and help the patient out. That’s what Alaska Communications has done for us and has made it possible. We use to have T-1 lines, well they’re fast, faster than the modems, but it still took awhile to for us to send images to our radiologist in Oregon. So we went with ACS and MPLS and sending images before we had MPLS, would send anywhere from 35 to 50 minutes, and that a long time to wait. So if you have your patient out there waiting, because they want to know what’s going on, that doesn’t work. When we went to MPLS, we knocked that time down to 7 minutes per send from about 40 minutes. It’s secure and it’s direct. It gets right there right now. We’ve actually installed phones in our radiology department that have video quality where you can actually talk to the radiologists in Rhapsody where we send our images to. So we have that availability for the doctors to look at. This is all part the technology that has been put in place by ACS. This is all part of the MPLS. They made this possible for us. We went from T-1 lines to MPLS and the cost did not change for us, it stayed the same. That was crucial in what we were doing. Every facility that has to deal with some type of internet is always looking at cost and reliability and those were a couple of the features we were looking at. We’ve never had our network go down. Usually you hear stories from other facilities that are dealing with another network asking, “How many times have you had your internet go down?” or “Have you ever had issues sending images down to wherever you send them?” And we say, “No. We’ve never had an issue.” Alaska Communications always says, “Call our technology guys if you ever have an issue.” I know I have the number somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s at. ACS is incredible. It’s made everything easier, faster, simpler and definitely efficient.
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