Visibility Into Healthcare’s Voice and Epic Services Helps Improve Quality

Customer Profile

For more than half a century, this top-ranked, academic health center has delivered the highest-quality care to the surrounding community, supporting hundreds of thousands of unique patients in millions of outpatient clinical visits per year. They boast several regional hospitals and scores of medical offices, including a Level 1 trauma center, a world-renowned pediatric hospital with neonatal intensive care unit, and advanced research facilities They are pioneers in a variety of general and specialized services, from cardiology, emergency, and orthopedics, to geriatrics and pediatrics. 

The medical center employs tens of thousands of physicians, nurses, and residents, along with researchers and faculty all dedicated to providing safe, swift diagnoses and personalized treatment plans for patients, as well as training and educating the medical professionals of tomorrow. It is critically important for these “heroes” and their patients to have efficient, high-quality network and application performance throughout their multi-vendor healthcare environment to enable delivery of exceptional patient experience. 

The Challenge

This healthcare needed visibility within and between their geographically distributed primary and back up data centers to assure performance and availability of all their clinical and business application services. There were a few critical areas of concern that the IT staff mandated the new network and application monitoring solution address: 

• Application performance assurance of Epic electronic health records used by doctors and nurses to positively impact patient outcomes, as well as other key clinical applications. 
• Visibility to troubleshoot issues in their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services for both voice and call set-up protocols, particularly for SIP Trunking. 
• Analysis of how the healthcare’s physical network was supporting traffic originating from the wireless network. 

Critical to the IT organization was executive-level involvement in defining what was needed to meet the vision for comprehensive visibility to their key projects, to network performance in their major data center with Cisco ACI, as well as to other essential clinical and business services including Citrix Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI), Health Layer 7 (HL7), and digital imaging and communication (Dicom) service. The CTO also wanted to ensure the solution would serve them well into the future for visibility as they moved into SaaS and Cloud environments. 

Solution in Action

Following a thorough evaluation, the IT team selected NETSCOUT^® to attack their current issues with UC&C and SIP Trunking as well as to gain the visibility into performance of Epic and the Citrix VDI serving as its front-end, as well as and other services. The IT staff leveraged NETSCOUT to provide: 

• nGenius 5000 series Packet Flow switches to be implemented in each data center when IT determined they required additional packet brokers to distribute traffic from key network points to the NETSCOUT data sources. 
• Several InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) software appliances are strategically deployed throughout their data centers for network and application monitoring and analysis, as well as wireless network visibility.
• nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution for performance analysis of all their monitored voice, video, and business data applications, both clinical and business applications, as well as network performance management. 
• NETSCOUT’s nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) to provide the IT staff with troubleshooting and best-practices expertise to build dashboards and workflows to assess the health of their Epic and VoIP services and quickly troubleshoot issues affecting voice quality or swift access to patient records. 

nVaaS was an important factor in selecting NETSCOUT, as the IT and executive teams at the healthcare needed the solution to be operating and impactful as quickly as possible. nVaaS would help them gain essential experience to rapidly reduce time to value for the NETSCOUT solution. 

The Results

Swift, safe, and secure patient care is the mission of all healthcare organizations. Quality voice calls and speed of access to patient records are essential, as is visibility across all their patient-impacting services. nGeniusONE is helping to answer the call in this regard, with the healthcare benefiting from a single-solution visibility into all their monitored applications across all their data centers to ensure patient and staff services perform optimally. 

The IT team is gaining a quick time to value with the overall solution through their engagement with the nVaaS team and the quick configuration of dashboards and workflows for alerts, troubleshooting, and reports on Epic and VoIP services, Addressing and pinpointing performance issues to improve quality of patient experience are key success criterial for this healthcare. nGeniusONE’s intuitive troubleshooting is a difference-maker in this regard, offering efficient workflows that IT leadership found lacking in other solution approaches. 

Further, the executive team at the healthcare has a foot in the present but an eye on the future. They are confident that the NETSCOUT solution put in place by their IT team will handle the visibility and analysis challenges of today and will continue to support the ever-evolving healthcare digital transformations to SaaS and cloud of tomorrow. A healthcare organization that never stops needs a service assurance solution that gives them visibility without borders.