New partnership will serve healthcare organizations throughout California and Arizona
National LambdaRail and CENIC Partner to Provide Advanced Network and Data Services for Healthcare
<0> National LambdaRailJen Hodson, 310-405-7539orCENICJanis Cortese, 714-220-3454 </0>
National LambdaRail (NLR) and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced that they will partner in the delivery of ultra-high bandwidth services to healthcare organizations in California and Arizona working in the diagnosis, prevention, treatment and management of illness and medical conditions of all kinds. Such organizations will include cancer centers, university schools of medicine, research institutions, hospitals, clinic, doctors’ offices, payers, providers, medical services companies and laboratories, imaging centers, genomic sequencing centers, computing facilities and data centers.
Today’s announcement follows the announcement last week of a collaboration between NLR and AT&T on communication services to healthcare organizations, first in California and ultimately across the United States. The addition of CENIC to the partnership creates very comprehensive connectivity within the California and Arizona healthcare community. It also marks a further enhancement of the developing partnership between NLR and CENIC, following the news in May that CENIC was providing full Network Operations Center (NOC) services to NLR as well as engineering support.
“This is another vital step towards an integrated health information infrastructure for the United States,” said NLR Chairman and CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. “These key partnerships for high volume, high speed data services to all medical institutions, put us well on the way towards making genomically-informed, evidence-based medical care a reality. Whole genome sequencing data can be deployed quickly to the service of clinical decision making at the point of care.”
Dr. Soon-Shiong added that the Cancer Knowledge Action Network - an initiative he announced in April - was an example of the kind of integrated information infrastructure that would be supported by the NLR-CENIC partnership. “Our partnership will be a vital tool in cancer care case management,” he said.
“CENIC is proud to be leading the way, as the regional network to partner with NLR in support of its healthcare focused mission,” said CENIC President and CEO, Louis Fox. "A national health network is going to be essential for our country, to maintain our leadership in research as well as to achieve better, affordable healthcare. That network begins here today.”
It is now a year since it was announced in July 2011 that NLR would form the backbone of a “national health intranet.” With the announcement last week of the AT&T partnership, beginning with Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica as the first to be connected, and now the CENIC partnership, California will be the first state to benefit from the new infrastructure. California will further benefit from CENIC and NLR’s connection with the California TeleHealth Network, a statewide broadband network which has so far enrolled over 300 rural healthcare provider sites, the combined resources thereby creating connectivity all the way from research and sequencing centers to local physicians in remote or underserved communities.
National LambdaRail is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization founded by the research and education community. It connects over 280 sites, including universities and federal laboratories, which use NLR’s 12,000 miles of high performance optical fiber in the United States and its connections to overseas networks for leading edge research, medical science, and patient care. Users include NASA, NOAA and NIH. NLR creates opportunities for collaboration, innovation and commercialization among the global research community as well as public and private partners. It also provides customized support for individual researchers and projects. For more information please visit
California's education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions. CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected. In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC's associates - researchers and educators - are engaged.