Case Study: Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative achieves centralized, HIPAA-compliant, cost-effective network security with Fortinet

Health Cooperative Discovers Fortinet as the Most Certified Security Vendor

Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative (RWHC) is a not‑for‑profit network of 39 rural hospitals that created the RWHC ITN to share EMR and ancillary services. Facing the need to network remote sites with centrally managed security, expand datacenter capacity as more facilities joined, comply with strict HIPAA/NIST requirements, and do it all on a limited HCF-funded budget, RWHC needed a flexible, certified security solution that minimized hardware and staff overhead.

Using Healthcare Connect Fund support, RWHC upgraded to Fortinet—chosen as the most certified vendor because its single‑box appliances combined firewall, IPS, DLP and other functions others required multiple devices to deliver. The deployment (FortiGate 200/300/1000 series, FortiAPs and FortiMail) put dual FortiGates at each hospital and plans for HA FortiGate pairs at the datacenter, delivering compliance, higher capacity (scaling connectivity toward 1G), simplified management and reduced IT and financial burden.

Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative

David Chitwood

Information Technology Manager