Next Gen Radiology increases efficiency with Optimum Lightpath

Like many healthcare companies, Long Island, NY-based Next Generation Radiology (NGR) consumes a good deal of bandwidth to conduct its daily operations. 

When NGR was originally founded, they were using one T1 at each of their four offices to transfer relevant data between the sites--a method that quickly saw signs of stress. But with little options available at the time, NGR had to install three T1 circuits at each of its four sites. To balance the traffic at each site, NGR had to install a 'fat pipe,' which is essentially load balancer that would break down the traffic and sends it across the lines and recreates it on the other side. Having three T1s at each office, while a slight improvement, proved to be nothing more than another band-aid solution since it added up to not much more than 4.5 Mbps of bandwidth.  

"We were basically having an issue moving stuff," said Frank Robbins, IT Administrator for Next Generation Radiology.

"It was taking forever to move some data such as mammograms across the network."  

In addition, NGR maintained a single T1 for Internet access at its Great Neck, NY site to send reads via a VPN to other specialty sites such as the Cleveland Clinic and four referring physicians that transmit MRI and CAT scans to their office.

Given the limited bandwidth of that one T1 circuit, Robbins explained that the solution was also another bottleneck.  

"We were having major problems with the VPNs because of the amount of data we needed to get across them and it was only one T1 so we were getting time outs and we would have to resend stuff," Robbins said. "It was a nightmare."   
Finally NGR found its savior in Optimum Lightpath. NGR opted to replace its rats nest of T1 circuits with one common 10 Mbps pipe from Cablevision's Optimum Lightpath for its voice and data needs. 

"Lightpath came to me and offered me 10 Mbps Internet pipes between the office, which doubled my bandwidth and it was actually going to save me money," he said.