Lightpath has long been a leader in telecommunications and technology solutions for mid and large-size enterprise businesses. But at the core of their values is being a truly innovative partner to customers – from their network and technologies, the services they deliver, the customer service they offer, and the people that lead these commitments every day.  

A Case In Point

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. At 357 beds, the non-profit hospital’s leadership has the vision 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, transmitting 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.

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. 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.” – Stephen Palomba, Senior Network Engineer 

The Problem

The team also has an extremely lean staff and there had been some past issues requiring their attention. Their disaster recovery site has been down multiple times due to connectivity failure experienced with a different connectivity provider or due to circumstances surrounding regional pathways impacted by outside circumstances such as accidents, fires, or other events. Downtime damages the institution’s reputation both internally and externally. 

“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.” 

All of this led Stephen to look for a connectivity solution that provided not only the needed reliability but also the best levels of support.

The Solution

Palomba valued and appreciated the importance of customer service and the relationship with their provider at the time was deteriorating. The provider was not responsive to ongoing circuit issues, continuously got new orders wrong and was not providing timely services. It became essential for Palomba to move to a provider that would take time to understand St. John’s  needs, provide the right solutions, and maintain quality service to promote optimal business continuity. And as a relatively small hospital, costs were also paramount.

When searching for a better solution, Palomba turned to Lightpath, as he was already a customer of Lightpath’s reliable and redundant phone services as well as 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. 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. The new dark fiber alleviated those last-mile problems while increasing reliability, security, and speed.  

Results and Benefits

Ultimately, by partnering with Lightpath, St. John’s Episcopal Hospital realized the following benefits: 

• Greater reliability and security through their own dark fiber network.
• Increased security with diverse paths and failover/redundancy for business continuity
• Relatively fixed costs for bandwidth that can easily increase by changing the equipment at the end of the fiber.
• More control with unlimited scalability and flexibility for future growth potential.
• A solution that supports the need for cost-effective, reliable connectivity so they can focus on prodigy high-quality care to their community. 

To learn more about how Lightpath can help you focus on your core business, visit lightpathfiber.com.