Protecting the Beating Heart of Healthcare: The Case for Network Observability

Over the past decade, innovative new technologies have been assisting healthcare providers as they focus on delivering the best care possible to their patients. Digital transformation initiatives are introducing invaluable tools geared toward improving the patient, doctor, pharmacist, and staff experiences.

Throughout their healthcare journey, patients inevitably will come into contact with critical applications that impact the quality of their user experience. These interactions might include everything from hospital admissions to in-office appointments and telemedicine visits. Patients and doctors rely on connectivity to access diagnostic imaging results from X-rays, MRIs, EKGs, and so forth, which are delivered through healthcare networks, patient portals, radiology applications, and imaging services. Administering medications via prescriptions that involve pharmacology applications or scheduling follow-up services such as physical therapy also are part of the patient journey dependent on networked applications and services.

All of these healthcare touch points must also connect, update, and interact with patients’ electronic health records (EMRs). Given the variety of vendors—such as Epic, Cerner, and GE Healthcare, to name just a few—consistent interoperability among the many services is absolutely essential. This highlights the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem.

For all of these systems and applications to work, interoperability needs to be flawless. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other staff members depend on being able to access data when and where they need it—whether it’s in a patient’s room, an urgent care facility, medical offices, or remotely located clinics—via any number of medical Internet of Things (IoT) devices, from computers on carts on wheels (COWs) or at nurses stations, tablets, or smart devices over ethernet or Wi-Fi connections. This further illuminates the complexity throughout the extensive healthcare ecosystem.

Let’s not forget, this is a 24/7/365 operation: There can be no downtime!

IT Faces Challenges Pinpointing Network Problems

When network problems arise, IT can be hard-pressed to resolve issues in a timely manner. Determining the root cause of bandwidth, performance, and interoperability problems can be like searching for a proverbial needle in a haystack. The importance of performance and user experience can’t be overstated. Lives are often in the balance.

Although it is a secondary concern, the impact on the productivity of healthcare staff and patient satisfaction can have a direct impact on the bottom line, reducing the number of patients that can be seen for revenue, increasing costly overtime to compensate for application slowdowns, and hindering a healthcare organization’s ability to remain competitive. Reputational damage from a poor patient experience can result in revenue-impacting implications.

Observability Is Key to Seamless Connectivity and Assuring Network Performance

IT professionals have the vital task of assuring the performance and security of networks and applications across the healthcare ecosystem. They must tackle any obstacles that stand in the way of a successful patient and care-giver experience, whether it be a computer glitch, an upgrade that goes awry, a problem with internet service, or an issue with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) provider.

Observability is key to ensuring seamless connectivity and assuring network and application performance. True end-through-end visibility allows IT to see the performance of mission-critical apps wherever they are hosted. Visibility at the business edges, such as points of transition with a vendor, provides insights into the handoff between a remote site or a private data center and a wide-area-network (WAN) provider or a third-party vendor for SaaS or UCaaS. IT also needs observability across data centers, co-locations, and cloud platforms.

When multiple vendors are involved, IT lacks the kind of control it enjoyed when everything resided in a private data center. Complicating matters, each vendor offers tools focused narrowly on its own services, which don’t provide a complete picture needed for effective troubleshooting.

What is needed is an ecosystem-wide, proactive visibility strategy. This is particularly important for being able to see remote user communications all the way through to the final application source. Observability at remote locations, such as hospitals, medical offices, and clinics, is essential to troubleshooting problems when they occur and reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR). Armed with this level of observability, IT can reduce the potential impact to patient care, as well as improve provider efficiency and protect hospital revenue.

Vendor-Independent, Packet-based Network and Application Performance Management

The best approach is one that relies on vendor-independent, packet-based network, and application performance management, which provides the insights necessary throughout the entire ecosystem to truly pinpoint the root cause of problems. NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution leverages both packet-level details and synthetic business transaction testing, delivering end-to-end analysis that helps address the complexities of multivendor, hybrid-cloud environments managed by today’s healthcare IT professionals.

Implementing a proactive observability strategy can really make a difference, helping IT teams to stay ahead of patient-impacting issues and reduce the time it takes to institute repairs. For an industry where nanosecond response time is imperative, packet-based network and application performance management is just what the doctor ordered.

View the webinar Observability for Performance and Availability in Healthcare Networks to learn more about how NETSCOUT helps address complex, multivendor, hybrid-cloud environments managed by healthcare IT professionals.