NCR Corporation has announced the implementation of a complete networking infrastructure for the Sultan Bin Adbulaziz Humanitarian City (SBAHC) in a deal worth two million dollars. The network gives the medical facility powerful new tools to provide healthcare to patients within the SBAHC hospitals and enables e-medicine across the rest of the country, bringing the finest medical expertise directly to patients, anywhere in the Kingdom.
Staff, patients or relatives can look for the information they need via the Internet. The vision of the SBAHC is to eventually be the center of a web of hospitals and clinics in the Kingdom, allowing skills and expertise to be brought to the patient’s bed-side, wherever they are in the world, through the miracle of modern e-medicine.
Equally important, e-medicine promises to improve access to health-delivery services in rural areas with chronic shortages of doctors and hospitals by giving care givers the ability to conduct real-time consultations with their patients over a video conference, or allow medical images such as X-Rays or MRI to be easily transmitted to specialist radiologists for interpretation, bringing the expertise of the SBAHC’s doctors to every part of the Kingdom – or region.
“The SBAHC will revolutionize the way health care is provided, both in the Kingdom and across the Arab world. We chose NCR to help us lay the technology foundations to help us achieve this vision by implementing a network that will ultimately connect us to other hospitals around the world,” said Project Department Director of the SBAHC Saleh Alshebil.
The Sultan bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City aims to roll-out e-health in early 2002 with clinical activities—diagnosis and therapy—distance learning and continuing medical education programs across the common infrastructure supported by NCR.
MeduNet, the medical network provider created by the Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Medical and Educational Telecommunications Program was the consultant for SBAHC. MeduNet designed the overall Network and prepared the RFP for the project. MeduNet supervised the project.
E-medicine can cut much of the cost of on-site care by using e-mail, telephone and video-conferencing consultations to link patients with health care providers. These collaboration capabilities are valuable in almost all phases of the medical process, from diagnosis to surgery to outpatient care, in medical fields ranging from psychiatric counseling to cardiology.
Located 30 kilometers north of Riyadh, covering an area of over one million square meters, the Sultan BAbdulaziz Humanitarian City was built to provide the best-in-class rehabilitative medical services.
The core network infrastructure is based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology from Marconi. NCR began the rollout in May 2001, finishing it in October 2001. Network analysis and probing will follow, leading to the full implementation of a security system as the SBAHC readies to go live.
“It will be possible to upgrade portions of the network based on new application requirements and business needs,” said NCR sales manager for Saudi Arabia Naim Yazbeck. “The ATM technology implemented is ideal for delay-sensitive, mission-critical applications; NCR has proposed a solution that fits the requirements of today, and also the future business needs of the SBAHC. It is a true partnership between NCR and SBAHC.”
NCR Corporation is a $6.2 billion company providing technology solutions to customers worldwide in the retail, financial, communications, manufacturing, travel and transportation and insurance markets. NCR's Relationship Technology solutions include privacy-enabled Teradata warehouses and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, store automation and automated teller machines (ATMs). NCR employs 31,900 in 130 countries, and is a component stock of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. — (menareport.com)
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