Even if everyone did eat an “apple a day” to keep the doctors away, the chances are that people of all ages, no matter what their current health status is, eventually are going to need care and treatment from walk-in clinics, medical specialists, and/or hospitals. And when they do receive care, how they are diagnosed, treated, medicated, billed, and even followed up on is going to be enabled by innovations in technologies created by digital transformation.
Telemedicine, electronic patient records, diagnostic imaging, e-prescriptions, and automated and integrated billing all need to be delivered and available from anywhere, at any time, and on any device. As a result, healthcare IT solutions must include visibility into on-premises and cloud environments across wired and wireless infrastructures in real time to ensure medical professionals have rapid, safe, and secure access to critical applications and patients are receiving the highest-quality interaction with their care providers.
Just what the Doctor Ordered
Last year, CIO Insight shared Top 6 IT Challenges in Healthcare, which it defined as data management and integration, seamless billing processes, compliance, security and privacy, telehealth infrastructure, and equitable access. NETSCOUT’s Scalable Deep Packet Inspection technology plays a critical role in meeting all those challenges. Our nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides real-time, continuous visibility for clinical applications, healthcare networks, and the business applications that support patient care.
Given the extensive reliance on Internet of Things (IoT) devices across Wi-Fi, assuring the digital user experience is essential. Mergers, acquisitions, and expansions of hospitals and clinics have created a vaster network of remote member hospitals, medical facilities, clinics, and even the home offices of physicians that require visibility. When poor performance or lack of application availability has human lives hanging in the balance, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) becomes even more important than it is in a traditional commerce-based enterprise or organization.
MTTR is fully dependent on mean time to knowledge (MTTK), which translated in its simplest form means understanding what’s wrong and where, so you can go solve that problem. Sounds simple enough, but unfortunately complexity of healthcare technology (equipment, devices, machines) coupled with the IT complexity that creates other challenges essentially stacks the deck against you. That is, unless you have what NETSCOUT calls Visibility Without Borders to surgically cut through all the complexity and pinpoint the root cause. Ironically, the most complex problems to diagnose often have the most simplistic root causes—causes that were hidden by an inability to look holistically, with specificity, at what really mattered.
Our hospital and healthcare customers use the Smart Data and Smart Analytics we derive from packets traversing the network to protect the health of applications, services, and critical infrastructure against performance degradations, availability issues, and cyberthreats. We abstract performance data from the packet itself without including any personalized/protected health information (PHI) from a medical record. Think about all the information that can be analyzed from a comprehensive blood test: amazing details and insight about the health status of the person, without having to know who the person is, where they live, or any personal information.
NETSCOUT Principal Sales Engineer Robert Wright and AVP Eileen Haggerty in “Solving Visibility Challenges in Hospitals to Ensure Quality Patient Care,” part of our Problem Solvers Series, share some very interesting facts and well-informed opinions about what hospital IT professionals face as they try to support the care and treatment of patients in modern hospitals. Their hospital and healthcare expertise is impressive, and they share what’s front of mind in the industry and the role NETSCOUT solutions continue to play in providing visibility to cure modern healthcare IT complexity.
Ensure quality care with NETSCOUT’s “Solving Visibility Challenges in Hospitals to Ensure Quality Patient Care” webinar discussion, part of our Problem Solvers Series.