Case Study: Rockford Health System achieves 20x faster medical image downloads and 96% WAN traffic reduction with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead Products Speed Transfer of Medical Images at Rockford Health

Rockford Health System, a 396‑bed tertiary care provider serving northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin with 12 sites and about 3,000 employees, faced slow WAN performance that left physicians waiting up to 20 minutes to download CT and MRI studies at remote clinics. Located across multiple LATAs, the hospital had limited bandwidth, could not justify costly DS3 upgrades or remote servers, and needed a solution that would improve image access for 500–900 daily remote users without breaking centralized IT operations.

After a one‑month proof of concept, Rockford deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances at remote sites, cutting image download times to 1–2 minutes and reducing WAN traffic by 96%. The appliances delivered nearly 20× performance improvement, saved the equivalent of 18–19 T1s, paid back in about four months, and are now part of the standard rollout for new clinics—preserving centralized IT while greatly improving clinician access to medical images.

Rockford Health System

Joseph Granneman

CTO, CSO, and Director of Information Technology