About LEARN: Activities & Accomplishments

University Of Texas Medical Branch

UTMB provides healthcare services to many of the correctional facilities in Texas. These facilities are geographically dispersed across the state and serve two million patient visits, dispense four million prescriptions, and conducts seventy thousand telemedicine sessions annually. To improve the quality of these services, UTMB has completed the conversion of its network that supports its Correctional Managed Care services from a shared T1- based state-wide network to a network that utilizes LEARN for its core intrastate network services.

UTMB's legacy network consisted of over 210 T1s that interconnected 140 locations that ultimately terminated in Galveston. Of these T1s, 30% were intra-LATA and 70% were inter-LATA T1's. The topology of the old network was a hub and spoke design where 4 to 6 clinics would connect to a central location and the central location would then connect to Galveston. The maximum bandwidth was 1 megabit, which was shared by upstream clinics in this topology. This topology placed economic restrictions on UTMB's ability to establish a disaster recovery data center that was needed to mitigate the impact of hurricanes.

The new network consists of 140 intra-LATA T1s that are directly connected to the LEARN gigabit network. On the new network, each clinic has a 1.5 megabit connection to a gigabit backbone network.

Due to the additional bandwidth, UTMB has improved network performance, provides higher quality services and has a more stable network, since the clinics are no longer experiencing network traffic congestion. Since UTMB is able to use fewer T1s and no inter-LATA T1's, UTMB's operating costs have decreased by 33 percent. Additionally, by utilizing LEARN, UTMB is able to have disaster recovery services in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for their Correctional Managed Care applications.