Customer Spotlights

St. John’s Episcopal Hospital provides emergency and ambulatory care to the densely populated, culturally and economically diverse, and medically underserved populations of the Rockaways and Five Towns in southern Queens County and southwestern Nassau County, New York. The 357-bed non-profit hospital's vision is to build an effective coalition to achieve improved community health in a financially stable environment.

However, hospitals and health systems like St. John’s Episcopal Hospital face the growing challenge of adopting cost-effective technology solutions to meet evolving high-quality care models. This means fast, reliable, and secure connectivity between multiple critical healthcare facilities, the transmission of medical records and images, and hosting virtual physician consults. That’s why dependable and robust connectivity is crucial to maintain efficient workflows and a good reputation.

So, it’s no surprise that Stephen Palomba, Senior Network Engineer at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital, has been hard at work continually upgrading their

network infrastructure since coming on board nine years ago. Most recently, the hospital has been expanding its footprint by constructing a site for its new Women's Center and opening a new administrative location in Garden City. “When you have multiple sites, connectivity is everything,” states Stephen. "Any day one of the sites is down, the organization loses the ability to transfer data or do any work. The potential loss can be as much as $20K in a day.”

And for their extremely lean staff, there have been some past issues. Their Disaster Recovery Site has been down multiple times due to connectivity failure experienced with a connectivity provider other than Lightpath or due to circumstances surrounding regional pathways impacted by outside events such as accidents, fires, or other. Downtime damages the institution’s reputation both internally and externally. Said Stephen, “When it comes down to it, I don’t peddle the bike. I must rely on someone else to peddle; if they are not delivering, it looks bad for the hospital and me.” This led him to look for a connectivity solution that provided not only the needed reliability but also the best levels of support.

Stephen Palomba fully appreciates the importance of customer service. While previously working with an unnamed provider, “We kept having circuit issues, and the provider was not very responsive. They also kept getting new orders wrong. After years of having their circuits, we couldn't get anything done, and everything took too long. It's as if they weren't listening when I said what I needed."

That's why it was essential to move to a provider who would take time to understand their needs, provide the right solutions, and maintain quality service to promote optimal business continuity. And as a relatively small hospital, the cost was also paramount.

Enter Lightpath

When searching for a better solution, Stephen Palomba turned to Lightpath.

He was already a customer of Lightpath’s reliable and redundant phone services and some data circuits. “Lightpath’s spot on with their customer service, responsiveness, and dependability, and has been instrumental in getting a lot of things done,” states Stephen. “With Lightpath, I get updates every month during an install. They are so responsive that now when I am looking for something new, I turn to Lightpath first.”

To best meet their needs, a decision was made to move connectivity to Dark Fiber. Previously, the circuits utilized with another vendor for the last mile contributed to downtime situations. The new Dark Fiber from Lightpath will alleviate those last-mile problems while increasing reliability, security, and speed. “And, as a small, safety net hospital, financials make a big difference. To have someone to work with us on price is key,” states Stephen. “Lightpath is more cost-effective, especially because they are willing to work with you.”

Partnering with Lightpath for Dark Fiber, St. John's Episcopal Hospital benefits from the following:

• Greater reliability and security since the organization is the sole user of the dark fiber network.
• Increased security with diverse paths and failover/redundancy for business continuity
• Relatively fixed costs for bandwidth. The institution can easily increase bandwidth by changing the equipment at the end of the fiber.
• More control with unlimited scalability and flexibility for future growth potential.

It’s a solution that supports St. John’s Episcopal Hospital’s need for cost-effective, reliable connectivity that enables them to provide high-quality care to their community. To learn more about how Lightpath can help your organization with connectivity solutions that drive better performance, visit lightpathfiber.com.