Blue Coat helps Kettering hospital transmit images on WAN

How did the hospital cut printing and courier costs?

Kettering General Hospital has deployed Blue Coat Systems’ ProxySG appliances to transmit X-ray and MRI scan images to other healthcare providers through WAN.

ProxySG appliances, built on SG operating system, provide a proxy platform architecture to protect web traffic and accelerate the delivery of business applications. The appliances have enabled the hospital to implement picture archiving and communications system (PACS). With PACS medical images can be stored, retrieved, distributed and presented on WAN.

Phil Taylor, senior IT operations analyst at the Kettering General Hospital NHS Trust, said: WAN optimisation enables us to extend our investment in PACS for cost savings and improved service across all of the Trust sites. The hospital could send the high-quality medical images within its own site thanks to its 1000 Mbps internal network, but sending images to other sites, such as the nearby Rushden Hospital, just 12 miles away, had been impossible without WAN optimisation from Blue Coat ProxySG appliances.

In addition to making the medical images exchange process faster, ProxySG has helped the NHS Trust cut its printing and courier costs. Till recently, the hospital was using the courier service to send the hard-copies of the images to other sites, as its previous network capacity wasn’t enough to use PACS. Blue Coat says that its appliances have decreased the time taken to load large images at the hospital by 80%.

Nigel Hawthorn, vice president of EMEA marketing at Blue Coat Systems, said: “Blue Coat ProxySG appliances have turned an expensive, time-consuming manual process into a fast, efficient one that results in better levels of healthcare. ProxySG appliances can make a tremendous difference in accelerating a wide variety of applications and content to branch offices and remote locations.’’

Gartner has ranked Blue Coat as the fastest growing company in the WAN optimisation equipment market for the third quarter of 2008. The company claims that its market share increased by 19% in the third quarter from the previous quarter, while the worldwide WAN optimisation market growth for the quarter was 4%.

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