NETSCOUT Remote Site Visibility: Just What the Doctor Ordered

Healthcare ecosystems are incredibly complex, composed of hospitals, clinics, physician practices, satellite offices, medical buildings, research facilities, and many more formats. Each of these sites and their employees contribute uniquely to the shared goal of providing reliable and high-quality patient care.

Digital transformations have accelerated the demand for accessible patient care from anywhere, at any time. Patients have higher standards for a seamless digital user experience and expect voice and video communications with their provider working at any remote site location to be dependable. Physicians and diagnosticians need seamless access to critical patient information to effectively treat and communicate with patients from wherever they are working. When reviewing imagery from X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans, clarity and quality are of the utmost importance to properly diagnose patient issues.

Remote Site Visibility Gaps Negatively Impact Patient Care

The expansion of remote site operations in the healthcare industry has dramatically changed the pattern of network and application traffic in two distinct ways.

First, the business side of healthcare has exploded with mergers and acquisitions that have pulled together large, distributed corporate healthcare networks. No longer is the local hospital simply that—it now is part of a much larger ecosystem of specialty facilities, from hospitals to medical buildings to headquarters offices for administration. Information technology (IT) responsibilities for sophisticated equipment, applications, and communications at each of these remote sites have also expanded exponentially. However, IT staff members themselves are stretched thin, often leaving gaps in skilled support at these vital remote sites.

Second, the data center is no longer the central source of IT activity. Instead, traffic spans across the cloud, colocations, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) technology on its journey to each remote site. Visibility gaps can cause major performance disruptions to go unaddressed—with serious business implications. Difficulty accessing patient information, inability to utilize appointment-scheduling software, and performance delays impacting the quality of imaging services are just a few examples of issues that can dramatically hinder operations and patient care at any location.

Without real-time visibility across the infrastructure and at critical patient care facilities, IT teams struggle to troubleshoot effectively and restore remote site operations to the performance standards that both patients and providers expect. Tunnel vision that is focused only on traffic in the data center prevents healthcare organizations from swift problem identification and resolution. For example, an issue may arise in which poor quality of imaging services stems from network file-sharing latency issues at a remote site hospital location. If the network operations team has visibility only into the data center, they will not be able to effectively troubleshoot the issue. This could result in significant service interruptions and negative patient care experiences—for example, requiring surgery to be postponed because of poor image quality.

A Clean Bill of Health for Remote Sites with NETSCOUT Solutions

NETSCOUT’s Visibility Without Borders platform helps essential healthcare organizations achieve the performance, availability, and security they need to deliver the best-in-class employee and patient care experience. With nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, IT teams can be sure that clinical healthcare applications such as Epic, Cerner, HL7, and picture archiving communications systems (PACS) services are optimized at every remote site. When disruptions, outages, or degradations do occur, NETSCOUT solutions provide IT teams with the packet-level information needed to isolate the true root cause of slowdowns and reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) for urgent issues.

As healthcare ecosystems expand and patients continue to rely on network and application operations at hospitals and medical buildings for their care, organizations need their performance and security tools to scale to support the business. NETSCOUT solutions provide the deep packet inspection at the scale needed to eliminate visibility gaps and assure the performance of remote locations powering essential healthcare systems.

Learn how this healthcare leader reduced latency in its mission-critical PACS service by implementing NETSCOUT solutions.