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The Importance Of Bandwidth At Your Medical Practice

A while back I talked with an ophthalmology practice administrator. We spoke about the issues with communicating between offices electronically. My colleague operates a practice with one location that was considering installing a LAN using the Internet. However, the doctors had reservations about giving their employees access to the Web. What the practice needs to ask themselves is this: what kind of network do we plan to have in the future, and how much bandwidth will it require?

?Bandwidth? has several definitions that depend on the context. Is it optical physicals, radio communications or a data transfer across digital communication systems? In this article, I refer to the latter definition. Regardless of whether your practice uses a single LAN or has many office locations, there's a limited amount of data that can be transmitted between any two computers. This data transfer can be thought of like water flowing through a pipe. In general, you can transfer more water (the data) if you use more pipes, or larger pipes. It could be possible to increase the rate of flow (data packets), but this will depend on the kind of computers and files involved in the transfer.

If the practice has multiple locations or anticipates having more than one single location, it's critical to understand what connections are available to communicate between them: regular phone line, dedicated phone connection, DSL, or a high-speed connection through fiber-optic cable backbone. This is particularly important if your practice intends to use some kind of imaging system which requires digital images to be viewable across the network.

Keep in mind that in addition to the obvious things that can quickly take up available bandwidth, your practice will require bandwidth for electronic billing, patient scheduling, email communications, and backing up and storing data. You many want to consider drawing up a list of functions which require bandwidth, and ranking them by priority as well as estimates of the amount of bandwidth which is required for completion of these tasks.

Imagine a new employee working the front desk that spends idle time surfing the Web, also downloading large files such as music or games, without the supervisor knowing. Your first clue of insufficient bandwidth will be a call from the office manager with a complaint that the electronic reconciliation isn't going through, and there seems to be some sort of problem with the connection. This example highlights the need for clear computer and Internet use policies for employees; search http://Google.com for some good example policies. The security of these connections is also important, and will be addressed in a future article.

Some available software programs can regulate the bandwidth made available to particular applications, functions, and users. Those applications which are absolutely critical to the operation of your practice, EMR or business transactions, for example, can have pre-established reserved bandwidth allotments. This way, if an employee leaves their work computer connected to an Internet radio station, the revenue of the practice won't be adversely affected. Most of the time, the available bandwidth is under-used, especially in the hours when your practice is closed. Setting a schedule for tasks to distribute bandwidth-intensive tasks can take the strain off of your network and help you avoid shortages during critical operations.

Peter J. Polack, M.D., F.A.C.S., is founder of emedikon, a medical practice management consulting firm and president of Protodrone, a software development company specializing in medical practice applications. See: http://www.medicalpracticetrends.com for more info.

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