Ensure Quality Patient Care Everywhere

Local hospitals and medical buildings rely on several mission-critical applications each day to provide quality patient care. Electronic health records (EHRs) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) applications are just two common examples providers count on for accurate, up-to-date patient information that can be used throughout healthcare networks with multiple vendors and third parties constantly communicating. Digital transformations in healthcare continue to evolve operations and show no signs of slowing down, with the global EHR market expected to reach $38.5 billion by 2030. With multiple hospital locations operating throughout cities and counties relying on these healthcare applications, IT teams will continue to need insight into performance wherever applications are hosted, including in private data centers, colocations, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments.

End-through-end visibility is critical to avoid slowdowns and degradations of healthcare applications being used in any hospital or medical building. Without continuous network and application performance monitoring in each location, IT teams will likely be presented with challenges emerging from visibility gaps. These challenges commonly include poor-quality digital user experiences, disrupted communications, lengthy network outages, and interrupted application performance. As a result, healthcare employees would be prevented from effectively doing their jobs from any working location where they are needed.

The Negative Implications of Application Performance Issues

Even planned outages can have a negative impact on healthcare operations, making it all the more important for IT teams to proactively monitor network and application performance to avoid unplanned disruptions. Should systemwide failures occur and catch healthcare providers on their heels, poor application performance may lead to negative consequences such as the inability to perform the following actions:

• Access, print, or distribute patient information such as allergies to medications, vaccination history, or emergency contact information
• Perform medical scans and utilize imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans
• Ensure that critical staff members are able to communicate and be paged to the right place at the right time—for example, in an operating room during a surgical procedure
• Access pharmaceutical applications to order and administer critical medication such as chemotherapy, insulin, or life-saving intravenous drugs

With so many hospital locations and third-party vendors in constant communication leveraging the same applications, the availability of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology is essential to ensure secure remote access to critical applications. For example, seamless access to Citrix when working in satellite offices is essential so that providers are able to reference the same records and patient information they can quickly pull up by logging into workstations in their primary hospital. Regardless of location or time of access, providers need to be able to rely on available VDI technology and real-time information updates. 

Patients, too, need to be able to securely verify their identity and gain access to their patient portals to communicate with doctors, physician associates, and nurse practitioners whenever necessary. Whether patients are on the road, in their home, on a mobile device, or on a desktop, security and ease of access are vital. If application performance is interrupted and online access is unavailable, patients will likely need to call reception for assistance. They may experience high call-volume wait times, and frustration may increase as their care is delayed.

NETSCOUT Solutions Eliminate Visibility Gaps for Healthcare Providers

NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions empower leaders in the healthcare industry to increase visibility at any hospital site. With this end-through-end visibility, IT teams can continuously gather packet-level insights into application performance. NETSCOUT Smart Data from InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances combined with intuitive nGeniusONE solution dashboards, reporting, and alerting capabilities enable network operations (NetOps) teams to reduce troubleshooting times and mean time to repair (MTTR) and proactively eliminate previously challenging visibility gaps.

Learn how this county hospital protected the performance of its mission-critical applications with NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions.