Date Published | Sept. 20, 2007

A state-of-the-art, dedicated high performance computer network being built for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA) will provide Ontario’s health-care system with a faster and more reliable communication infrastructure.

According to Vijai Karthigesu, the SSHA’s senior network architect, it will be the largest private health-care network in the world.

Until now, SSHA has purchased network access from service providers.
“They provide service over a network that they provide to other customers, so it’s a shared network,” said Karthigesu.

The new province-wide private network will connect more than 550 sites, including hospitals, clinics and pharmacies.

Users will definitely notice a difference in transfer speeds, especially for saving diagnostic images such as CT scans and MRIs to central repositories, said Karthigesu.
The prime contractor, Hydro One Telecom, has selected Ontera to connect all of the sites in northeastern Ontario and to work with Thunder Bay Telephone in the northwest.
The private network will offer most health-care sites significantly more bandwidth and improvements in redundancy and reliability.

Using shared, service provider networks, SSHA had to pay the service provider for quality of service functionality, which prioritizes the transfer of mission critical data.

With the new private network, there’s no additional cost to turn on quality of service, said Karthigesu.

Quality of service will be especially important for telesurgery, a life-critical application sensitive to fluctuations in latency.

“You can have a delay, but the delay cannot change,” said Karthigesu. “You have to have a network that has consistent latency from point A to point B over a long distance.” The network will handle data from multiple health-care information systems used by hospitals, labs, pharmacies and community care access centres.

In Northern Ontario, “117 health-care facility sites will be connected through over 1,500 kilometres of network running east-west, and 844 kilometres running north-south,” said Paul Goulet, vice president of Ontera.

The new network will be operational in Northern Ontario by December, but it will another year or two for Ontera and Thunder Bay Telephone to optimize the infrastructure.

The network will be developed and operated at no additional expense to the province.