H3C Helps Shandong Provincial Hospital Achieve Informatization

Client introduction

Founded in 1897, Shandong Provincial Hospital is a provincial-level general hospital with a 106-year history that combines medical care, teaching, scientific research, disease prevention, health care, and training for primary-level hospitals.

Shandong Provincial Hospital has set up several specialized buildings for outpatient, internal medicine, surgery, health care, reproductive medicine research center, tumor research and treatment center, and other departments. With 1,650 beds and 66 clinical and medical departments, the hospital has an annual average of 1.2 million outpatient visits, 33,700 patient discharges and 14,000 surgeries.

The hospital has a high degree of technical expertise, not only with advanced medical devices but also with a team of technical backbone and discipline leaders with remarkable academic achievements and rich clinical experience. The hospital has more than 2,000 employees, including nearly 430 senior technical personnel with the titles of chief and associate chief physician, professor, researcher, and corresponding titles.

As a clinical medical school of Shandong University, Shandong Provincial Hospital has established teaching and research rooms in all clinical departments. The hospital has 32 master programs and 170 master supervisors, 19 doctor programs and 38 doctor supervisors, and a post-doctoral research center for clinical medicine. The hospital undertakes the lecture, internship, and postgraduate teaching training work for Shandong University School of Medicine and Shandong University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and other schools, and has trained a significant number of highly talented individuals.

Current network status

As a medical department that started to use computers for service processing and office management at an early stage, Shandong Provincial Hospital attaches great importance to medical information construction. After its network upgrade of 10 Megabit coaxial cable, 10 Megabit twisted pair, fast 100 Megabit Ethernet, and 100 Megabit Switched Ethernet, the hospital has now established an Ethernet campus network with Gigabit Ethernet serving as the backbone and coexistence of Fast Switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet.

However, with the expansion of hospital scale, the advancement of medical technology, and the reform of the medical system, the original network can no longer meet the needs of hospital development. The problems faced by the hospital include insufficient processing capacity of the original core switch, single point failures of the single-star network, and difficulties in managing devices from multiple vendors. Therefore, the transformation of the existing network has become a priority of the information construction of Shandong Provincial Hospital.

Network building target

Based on the information system building implementation plan of the hospital, the main goal of the network building is to meet the continuous business development needs of the hospital in the next three to five years and beyond by building a secure, reliable, high-performance, and easily expandable network infrastructure platform.

The backbone network rate reaches Gigabit and can be smoothly scaled to a higher rate. The network's core nodes can offer redundancy and hot standby to ensure the system operates continuously and smoothly. The network should have the features of high bandwidth, high reliability, high performance, and high security.

Meanwhile, the network platform should provide high service quality and security while being simple to operate and maintain. It should not only support the needs of office work, medical treatment, and research applications, but also support remote work, information release, and online medical treatment and medical research collaboration.

The upgraded network must meet the following requirements:

lReliability: The system has some redundancy and backup capabilities, allowing for rapid recovery in the event of a failure.

lHigh performance: There should be no network bottlenecks that would impede normal transactions in the case of a large number of users and sudden large traffic.

lMultiple services: In addition to carrying out the data services of the Management Information System (MIS), special consideration should be given to the needs of medical image transmission and digital video services, as well as the quality of service and reliability of the network system.

lEasy management: To ensure system operation, the network must be well managed, such as accurately analyzing network traffic, determining system operation status, and monitoring intrusion from unauthorized users.

Technical solution

Shandong Provincial Hospital adopted the Gigabit Ethernet solution offered by H3C after carefully analyzing the hospital's service requirements, the design mode of the wiring system, and the current and future development of the network application needs.

The H3C S9505 10 GbE core switch was added to the network center. Together with the original network core devices, the S9505 switch constitutes the core switching system of the entire Shandong Provincial Hospital information system in the form of redundant backups. With the carrier-grade design concept, all key components such as switching engines, power supplies, and fans support redundant backup, and the whole switch provides 180 Mpps switching capacity from layers three to seven.

The S5516 high-density modular Gigabit switch is selected for each office and research center. It is connected by two 10 Gigabit core switches and Gigabit Ethernet ports and provides 1000M fiber access to the floor access switches, building the Gigabit backbone network of the hospital.

The H3C S3000 series cost-effective product is selected as the access switch. It has fixed configuration of 24/48 100 Gigabit ports with line rate and has 2 Gigabit expansion slots. For network building, the Gigabit uplink is configured. The S3000 full series switches also support the 802.1X authentication function. It ensures that only authorized users can access the network, prevents unauthorized users from invading the hospital system, and ensures the security of hospital operation data and patient information.

To enhance management, the entire network also used the Intelligent Management Center (IMC) provided by H3C. H3C provides standards SNMP V1 and V3 protocols and supports RMON, RMON2, and standard Management Information Base (MIB). Meanwhile, the graphical management interface, simple operation, and reasonable network planning strategy provide the hospital with powerful network management features. The integrated network management makes the daily maintenance and operation of the network intuitive, convenient, and efficient.

With the advanced modular cross-platform technologies, H3C achieves the development based on Windows and the combination with third-party network topology platforms such as NetView and OpenView. This enables the unified management of devices from multiple vendors.

Service benefit

Shandong Provincial Hospital has built a high-security, high-reliability. and multi-service bearing network platform through network upgrade. The current network not only supports nearly 3,000 information points of access, but also guarantees the reliable bearing capacity of the medical imaging systems when large data traffic occurs, removing the original performance bottlenecks.

With the Gigabit port binding of H3C switches and the 10 Gigabit expansion capacity of the S9505 switch, the network of Shandong Provincial Hospital can meet the demand for service expansion in the next three to five years or even longer, fully protecting the existing investments of users.