The Lippis Report

By Cisco and The Menninger Clinic

One of the world's premier psychiatric hospitals for over 80 years, The Menninger Clinic has earned a reputation as a leader in mental health treatment, research, and education. Information technology plays a vital role in supporting Menninger's state-of-the-art treatment programs. The network at its location in Houston serves 400 employees and spans seven buildings on 14 acres. Each building is connected via a fiber-optic backbone to a central server facility on campus that hosts information critical to treatment and hospital management.

Network integrity and security are essential to keeping Menninger's medical operations running. Like most healthcare organizations, Menninger must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes stringent regulations for handling and safeguarding patient records. "œOur biggest issue is HIPAA compliance," says Michael Farnum, information security manager at Menninger. "œHIPAA requires that we document any network incidents and report them in a timely manner."
Menninger is a medium-sized psychiatric hospital with an IT staff of six. Manually tracking and reporting the dozens of network events that occurred each day made HIPAA compliance an increasing burden. "œOne of the main issues that I was confronting was simply checking logs and keeping track of all the day-to-day activity on our network," says Farnum. "œI am the only dedicated security person, so it was a huge challenge." Farnum further commented, "œWe depend on our network and servers to support our patient information databases and our medication administration applications. We also depend on our network to document patient care on a daily basis."