Patton-Fuller Community Hospital has been in business in the City of Kelsey since 1975.
The hospital provides high quality medical care to the citizens of Kelsey and the
surrounding area. Some of the services the hospital offers are x-rays, pharmacy, and
emergency services for children and adults. As one of the first hospitals in Kelsey, the staff
is committed to providing a variety of programs that will support the health and welfare of
the local community populations (Apollo Group, 2010).
The hospitals backbone network structure for the entire hospital is 1000Base T. Some of
the other individual sections of the departmental network use different standards such as
1000Base F. The areas that use the 1000Base T are responsible for the administrative side
of things. These areas are: hospital executive management, human resources, operations,
facilities, finance, and IT data center. The areas that use the 1000Base F are responsible for
the clinical areas. They include: radiology, operating rooms, wards, ICUs, emergency
rooms, labs, and pharmacy. For a failsafe, the entire hospital has a complete power backup
system that automatically cuts over to a large diesel motor generator set.
The hospital uses a network bridge to interconnect its logical network. A network bridge
connects multiple network segments at the data link layer, which is Layer 2 of the OSI
model. The Data Link Layer enables data to be transferred between network entities and
might provide the means to detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the
Physical Layer. The hospitals network is an Ethernet network. The Ethernet network uses a
protocol called CSMA/CD which stands for Carrier Sense, Multiple Access with Collision
Detection. The computers that use 1000Base T are networked with Cat. 6 cable. This cable
allows for backward compatibility with the Cat. 5 and Cat. 3 cable standards but offers an
increase in performance of up to 250 MHZ. The computers that use the 1000Base F are
networked with single mode fiber because it performs at high speeds without the need to
be refreshed and have higher bandwidth than multimode fiber.
In order to have access to the Internet, Patton-Fuller utilizes a Cisco Router model 7609. It
is connected with an Optical Carrier 1 line that has speeds of up to 51.84 m/bits. The
hospital also utilizes a Cisco ASA 5510 Virtual Private Network which enables
organizations to securely provide network access to a broad array of users, including
mobile and fixed endpoints, remote offices, contractors, and business partners (Cisco,
