The Critical Role of Connectivity in Modern Healthcare
Healthcare delivery has undergone a significant reshaping in recent years. This has been expedited by digital transformation, which has driven an evolution from paper records to connected digital counterparts, making healthcare more connected than ever. Doctors need to have reliable connections with key applications, such as EPIC EHR, telehealth, or ePharmacy systems, to provide timely and thorough patient care in the modern age of healthcare. When latency or disruption strikes, the stakes can be high; operational efficiency, regulatory compliance issues, or even patient wellbeing can be impacted by the reliability of network performance.
NETSCOUT helps leading healthcare entities assure network performance, security, and more at any scale. The Beating Heart of Today’s Modern Healthcare Organizations is Reliable Network Connectivity dives into how one large-scale national healthcare organization leveraged NETSCOUT observability to ensure the highest quality doctor and patient experience.
The Challenges of Complexity, Latency, and Risk
The organization in question is massive, serving tens of millions of patients across nearly a dozen states more than 700 facilities. This large, widely dispersed physical and digital footprint created the challenge of scaling to a complex environment. The organization leveraged a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) to meet their growing connectivity needs. This solution made it possible for doctors, technicians, patients, and administrators to access the key applications that power their modern healthcare systems regardless of location.
This necessary shift to SD-WAN to meet the network’s needs in terms of scale created more complexity as it grew, leading to visibility gaps. These visibility gaps increase risk, as the cause of performance issues can reside in these blind spots, leading to extended latency.
Latency and downtime can have a major impact on all parties when it strikes a healthcare organization.
Delayed results of critical medical tests, leading to slower diagnoses or formulation of treatment plans
Slower delivery of prescriptions to pharmacies, delaying the receipt of critical medications
Inability to see providers on telehealth applications when urgent health services are needed
Doctors cannot review medical histories in full, leading to slower and, potentially, less accurate treatment
To make matters worse, when network visibility is not complete, connectivity issues become more difficult to triage and troubleshoot, leading to extended downtime and latency. This places additional burden on IT teams to restore network performance.
NETSCOUT Observability in Action
As a long-standing partner of multiple decades with the healthcare organization, NETSCOUT was chosen to help improve network visibility. NETSCOUT observability, powered by Smart Data, provided the real-time, edge-to-core visibility the organization needed to close visibility gaps and reduce latency and downtime. By instrumenting throughout the organization’s hundreds of remote locations spread across the United States, centrally located IT teams could keep tabs on the network’s performance across the entire distributed digital ecosystem.
This comprehensive visibility reveals critical interdependencies from the core of the network all the way out to the devices patients interact with. By gathering this key network and application performance data and distilling it into real-time, actionable intelligence, called NETSCOUT Smart Data, the provider can pinpoint the source of latency issues to improve mean time to response (MTTR).
NETSCOUT observability solutions also help the provider assure the performance of voice and video applications, such as those that power telemedicine. In doing so, doctors, nurses, and administrators can do their jobs more efficiently while also protecting an important revenue driver for the organization in telemedicine capabilities.
Tangible Results Across the Healthcare Organization
The results of the investment were felt across the organization, from patients and nurses to the C-suite. The CTO, specialized healthcare services of the organization had this to say,
“I would say that [the investment in NETSCOUT] is absolutely worth it because of the risk avoidance and our duty to protect our patients and ensure that we have a medical-grade IT system. The value that NETSCOUT brings is just immeasurable in those lifesaving moments.”
The provider saw tangible benefits of their investment in NETSCOUT observability solutions. Some of these results include:
Faster issue resolution
Improved uptime for EPIC, telehealth, and ePharmacy
Enhanced patient experience and clinical outcomes
Support for compliance and digital transformation
Strengthened reputation and revenue growth
Why Observability is Non-Negotiable in Healthcare
Ensuring that patients and medical providers are protected is paramount for any healthcare organization. This protection takes many forms. Whether it be availability of key health record applications, securing sensitive patient data, or application performance to ensure the best care possible, the stakes can truly be life or death.
Read the case study The Beating Heart of Today’s Modern Healthcare Organizations is Reliable Network Connectivity