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BUSINESS

San Antonio Kidney Disease Center
Benefits from Network Investments

Healthcare providers are working to increase the quality of pa- Philip Moya of San Antonio Kidney Disease Center
tient care, reduce costs and ensure regulatory compliance by lever- has established two paths to connect clinics to the
aging network-delivered clinical and business applications. data center.
However, moving mission-critical healthcare applications to the
network increases bandwidth and reliability requirements. Not sur- anybody else’s network. We backhaul all of our Internet access
prisingly, a 2016 survey of IT leaders finds that improving speed through our main site, which runs through our filters. [If we] have
and performance are the top drivers for network investments.i to failover off the private network onto the wide-open Internet
…everything’s encrypted.” From a security standpoint, the
The San Antonio Kidney Disease Center Physician Group SAKDC network is built to such a high standard that Moya says,
P.L.L.C. (SAKDC) is a medical practice that has made strategic “Passing the ‘Data in Motion’ portion of a HIPAA audit… would
investments to ensure its network infrastructure stays ahead of be very easy.”
the curve. Founded in 1978, SAKDC is one of the largest
nephrology practices in Texas with 30 physicians and 100 em- When it comes to network performance, an ounce of preven-
ployees working in 15 satellite clinics to serve thousands of pa- tion has provided a pound of cure for SAKDC. Thanks to its new
tients across the region. network infrastructure, Moya says that keeping healthcare infor-
mation flowing “is just a non-issue.”
Three years ago SAKDC relied on legacy T1 connections to
link its locations. As data traffic from its patient management sys- About Time Warner Cable Business Services
tem, scheduling and electronic health records (EHR) surged, the Time Warner Cable Business Services, a division of Time
practice’s communications arteries became clogged. Frustrated
physicians and support staff demanded a better solution. Warner Cable, offers a full complement of business communica-
tions tools to small, medium and enterprise-sized companies
Philip Moya, SAKDC’s IT director, spearheaded the shift to under its Time Warner Cable Business Class brand. Its Internet,
high-performance network connections using fiber-optic and voice, television, network and cloud services are enhanced by
cable modem solutions. In addition to increasing bandwidth, award-winning customer service and local support teams.
SAKDC needed to meet key network reliability and business con- Through its NaviSite subsidiary, Time Warner Cable Business
tinuity objectives. Following an in-depth technical evaluation, Services also offers scalable managed services, including applica-
SAKDC chose to create an Ethernet Private LAN linking clinics tion services, enterprise hosting and managed cloud services pri-
to its main office data center via two paths. The primary connec- marily in the U.S. and U.K. Time Warner Cable Business
tion is a fiber-optic circuit that links 13 remote clinics at speeds Services, founded in 1998, serves approximately 750,000 business
up to 100 Mbps. Secondary connections are provided by cable customers throughout Time Warner Cable’s service areas.
modems. Should the fiber connection go down at any location,
the cable modem establishes a virtual private network (VPN) link i “2016 State of the Network Study,” Network World
back to the data center to maintain connectivity and continuity.
For more information, visit
“We did not want one single point of failure at any of our sites,” https://business.timewarnercable.com/
Moya explained. “It would have done no good to put fiber and
cable modems at each of our clinics and to just have one connection
here at the main office. So we were adamant about having two sep-
arate paths into the building.” The way the circuits are configured,
Moya adds, it “would take two simultaneous 18-wheelers [hitting
poles] in two different part of the city to take us out.”

Like all healthcare practices, SAKDC must comply with
HIPAA privacy and security requirements. The configuration of
the Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) solution is in-
strumental in supporting those efforts. Moya explains that “no-
body else’s data touches our network; our data doesn’t touch

26 San Antonio Medicine • July 2016