General Hospital of the Chinese Army

Background The Chinese army’s General Hospital, one of the biggest and most important healthcare centers in China, is a 21-floor, 1.1 million square meter facility which carries out cutting-edge patient care, medical research and teaching activities. To help streamline its administration and increase efficiency, the hospital has adopted the paperless office approach in which all records are stored in a “central intelligence system” and accessed via the Internet.    The central intelligence system is an integrated whole comprised of five components: a medical treatment office system, an information publishing system, a medical information query system, a clinical information system and a hospital information system. The smooth functioning of these critical systems – and therefore of the hospital as a whole - depends upon the continuous availability of a high-speed, high-performance communications networks able to flawlessly handle mega-quantities of data traffic.

Challenge The communications network of this vast hospital includes well over 24,000 ports, including more than 10,000 ports in the surgery ward and another 10,000 ports in the Medical building. In planning the infrastructure for this extensive network, the hospital’s IT staff recognized that even small mistakes or delays in information transfer – for example, the malfunctioning of a data port in the surgery ward that delayed the availability of critically-needed information - could make the difference between life and death. As such, they searched out an intelligent infrastructure solution that could continuously monitor the connectivity of all system ports and components, deliver alerts when it discovered errors, and assist in ongoing network planning and maintenance.     RiT Advantage and Solution  In early 2009 the medical center’s IT staff selected RiT’s PatchView™ as the best Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) solution available, and carried out a first-stage deployment to bring intelligent monitoring to the surgery ward’s 10,000+ ports. Commenting on the solution, Mr. Jiang, from the Technical Department of the General Hospital said, “RiT’s system delivered significant benefits almost immediately. Our efficiency improved, and we achieved a much lower rate of error – all while actually reducing our overall IT costs. This satisfying performance led us to deploy PatchView also in the medical building.”    RiT’s PatchView IIM solution is able to scan the hospital’s entire cabling system within a few seconds, and to report an up-to-date status of all network connections and equipment usage vacancies. When it senses a problem or connectivity error, it sends alert information immediately to the responsible IT staff, and actually guides them through the steps needed to solve the problem with LED-enabled support. As such, use of PatchView enables the IT staff to shift their focus from routine manual tasks to strategic matters.