Felix Platter Hospital Implements Cisco Intent-Based Networking

ZURICH, Switzerland – Cisco announces that Felix Platter Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, is deploying Cisco® Intent-Based Networking to create the foundation for the hospital’s digital operation. The new, highly secure network is designed and deployed by Itris Enterprise AG, a Cisco Gold Partner in Switzerland, and is expected to be fully operational by December 2018.

The Felix Platter Hospital is one of the leading Swiss university centers for medicine of aging and rehabilitation. With 320 hospital beds and 700 staff, it is dedicated to innovative research projects and serves as a teaching hospital for geriatric medicine.

The intuitive network will power several applications used by doctors, nurses, patients, and hospital operations, including the hospital information system and asset tracking for medical equipment. The building’s automation system, voice and video communication (including mobile devices) and the patient entertainment system will also run on the same network, thus saving significant costs for implementation and management.

“Digitizing our hospital on all levels—from healthcare systems to patient-facing services, collaboration tools for our staff, and building management—is a major undertaking and a unique professional challenge,” says Laurent Wagner, CIO of Felix Platter Hospital. “We were looking for a solution where end-to-end security is embedded into the network. Total cost of ownership and the possibility to manage mobile devices as an integrated part of the network played an important role in our decision, as did the quality of the offer, the references, and the professionalism of the Cisco and Itris teams.”

Laying the foundation for digital healthcare

The Cisco Digital Network Architecture (Cisco DNA™) provides Felix Platter Hospital a portfolio of innovative hardware and software designed to work together as a single, integrated system. It brings many benefits to the IT team, ranging from simplified management to automation, segmentation and integrated security.

Simplified Management: At the heart of the hospital’s new network is Cisco DNA Center, a centralized management dashboard providing IT teams with the ability to translate business intent into IT policy. With full visibility and contextual insight across the entire network, Cisco DNA Center allows the IT department to centralize management of all network functions.

Automation and Segmentation: Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) is another primary element of the solution. It uses automated policy enforcement and network segmentation over a single network fabric to simplify network access for users, devices, and things. By automating day-to-day tasks such as configuration, provisioning, and troubleshooting, SD-Access improves issue resolution from weeks and months to hours and dramatically reduces possible security breach effects. Integration with Cisco ACI™ functionality in the data center will allow the IT team to put applications front and center and to provision network services faster.

Security: The architecture has been designed with cybersecurity in mind. This will help enable Felix Platter Hospital to not only prevent attacks but also to have the right tools in place before, during, and after attacks. The hospital’s IT team will use Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Network Admission Control (NAC) to manage the wireless network and to create and manage user and asset profiles. Additional important elements of the security architecture will include Next-Generation Firewall with Advanced Malware Protection (AMP); AMP for endpoints; and Cisco Umbrella™, a highly secure Internet gateway that provides this first line of defense to protect employees both on and off the corporate network.

“Healthcare is one of the sectors in which digitization has been top of mind for quite some time. Yet we are still only seeing the early days of truly digital healthcare, with the rise of electronic patient records alongside connected devices and applications such as health monitors, medicine dispensers, and first responder connectivity. Being at the forefront of innovative research, Felix Platter Hospital realized the need for a sound foundation with an intuitive network that embeds security into the network rather than bolting it on,” says Christian Martin, general manager Cisco Switzerland.