Health information exchanges (HIEs) are an important development in transforming healthcare by enabling clinicians, administrators, and payers to share electronic patient information. When care providers can access all of a patient’s information at the point of care – including test results, current medications, allergies, and previous history – better treatment decisions can be made, resulting in lower costs and improved outcomes.

But when it comes to handling medical records, security and reliability are both essential. Reliability is critical to ensure that the right information – including high-bandwidth data such as medical image files – is delivered quickly. And that information needs to be transmitted securely to protect the patient privacy.

Ethernet provides an ideal backbone for HIEs. It provides high bandwidth and low latency in the connection between the medical facility, care team and patient, providing the necessary reliability. And Ethernet is highly scalable, able to add additional capacity quickly to support expanding practices as well as increasing volumes of video, images, and other high-bandwidth data. And Ethernet permits secure data transmission, which is critical to meet HIPAA and other regulatory requirements to protect patient privacy.