Client: Radiology Group
A 50-people Radiology Group that prides themselves on having one of the strongest Service Level Agreements in the industry, often returning completed reads to their Doctors within one hour. In this environment, quality and resilience of the communications is critical and even a 99.9% uptime is not good enough to deliver STAT-grade service. Their CIO relies on vendors as partners to keep his small IT staff focused on strategic tasks.
Challenges
- Designing the network that can deliver 100% uptime with a maximum 15 minute Mean Time to Repair in case of an outage. The existing solution was utilizing Internet connectivity from multiple vendors and Client was experiencing at least one outage per month
- Identifying cost effective high quality bandwidth options for facilities located in remote areas. Because of high cost of connectivity in rural areas, bandwidth was frequently a significant driver for measuring ROI
- Receiving integrated engineering and pricing support from large telecom service providers. Engineering and account management teams with telecom service providers would change frequently and Client had to re-educate new resources on their network and requirements
- Finding vendors who can become an extension of the small internal IT to free up employees for strategic activities
Solution
IQ Wired collected all telecom invoices and had several discussions with the CIO to discuss goals and business drivers. IQ Wired then proposed several different Wide Area Network topologies and identified Metro Ethernet as the best fit because of its resiliency and security. IQ Wired team provided bids from multiple vendors in a side by side comparison resulting in selection of CenturyLink. IQ Wired project coordinator managed the transition, validated billing accuracy and remains the main point of contact for any ongoing billing, technical and strategy needs.
Why IQ Wired
Client chose IQ Wired to act as an broker to interface between them and telecom providers because in their words, it is similar to how they view a realtor: ‘We can buy a house by myself, but would be more likely to make mistakes so why wouldn’t I use an broker when it doesn’t cost us anything. We have worked with other Brokers over the years but they didn’t bring the quality of IQ Wired’
Results
Client achieved an overall cost reduction of more than 30% in their environment. This was particularly significant at one of the rural sites that almost got shut down due to high connectivity costs. Generated savings helped patients retain their ability to get x-rays read by remote radiologists. Since the migration, across all of their 16 sites Client was able to achieve 100% uptime with guaranteed SLAs to repair whereas before they were experiencing periodic downtime of one site per month for few hours at a time. In addition, this mid-sized Client was able to get support on pricing and service that service providers generally reserve for only their largest Clients.