Borrego Health Chooses Mushroom Networks' SD-WAN

Borrego Health provides a number of healthcare services to its patients in Southern California. Lately, healthcare officials and practitioners have found themselves bogged down in an outdated MPLS communications system that did not handle voice, video, or electronic records as well as they need. This moved them to seek out Mushroom Networks (News - Alert) and the potential of software-defined networking (SDN).

Mushroom Networks uses its expertise as a provider of wide area networks (WANs) to help its customers transition from traditional to advanced forms of secure networking and communications. It also seeks to lower its clients’ operating costs and the complexity of managing such infrastructure in years to come. Dave Baldwin, the chief information officer at Borrego, commented on the critical role its data sharing plays in the lives of practitioners and patients.

“In addition to our VoIP and video collaboration applications, we needed better reliability and performance for our electronic health systems (EHS) data,” Baldwin said. “EHS is a fundamental cloud application for our clinics. Our EHS services can’t go down. It literally can be a matter of life and death. As a result, we evaluated many different SD-WAN platforms in order to secure the most reliable solution available. After extensive evaluation, Mushroom Networks was the only one that met our needs.”

Baldwin does not mince words in his statement. He makes it clear that the direct relationship between patient records and patient health outcomes places the EHS on solid footing beside all other treatments and equipment within Borrego’s facilities. This means that its service providers – now Mushroom Networks – must be able to meet that demand.

Mushroom Networks’ Truffle (News - Alert) Broadband-Bonding SD-WAN begins its takeover of Borrego’s aging copper line-based system by using multiple broadband lines to speed up services by a matter of multiple degrees. It will lift the speed of the healthcare center’s services from 23 Mbps to 400 Mbps. In this situation, it bonds as many as three WAN circuits from multiple carriers at each site in order to achieve the boost of 400-percent capacity.

The entire network will also see an improvement in its ability to continue in the face of small network failures. Any issues in one part of the network can fail over to a second or third part. Only one WAN connection needs to continue running for each hospital to have service.

SDN also plays a key part in these upgrades because it has been fitted with enhancements such as the Mushroom Networks VoIP Armor service that shields IP-based voice conversations from network inconsistencies. It helps eliminate jitter and packet loss from conversations so hospital officials can experience clear call quality at any time of the day. The service has been called resilient and necessary to combat the inconsistency inherent in IP-based private branch exchange connections.

This upgrade has taken place for a reported 70 percent in savings compared to what similar performance would cost on separate MLPS, Internet, and Ethernet connections from multiple vendors. Mushroom Networks is so excited about this project that it will display the entire setup at an upcoming industry conference.