The New Networking Realities in Healthcare

Systems for managing electronic health records (EHRs), clinical decision support, claims and payments, operations, and more are advancing rapidly in the healthcare industry. A more complex and dynamic mix of internal and external networks now play an integral role in patient outcomes. Digital transformation in healthcare is swiftly moving from islands of data to interconnected hybrid environments through critical apps like Epic Systems.

While some data must remain on-premises, the increasing reliance on third-party providers for cloud services, networking, and communications has left healthcare providers with a new challenge. Critical services are no longer managed in-house, meaning that when issues arise IT may have difficulty understanding what and where the problem is. IT and network operations (NetOps) teams need to employ new technologies and approaches to operate, manage, and secure healthcare networks.

To effectively support their organization’s digital transformation, they need solutions that deliver several critical capabilities:

• Comprehensive scope and high scalability. Today’s teams need to contend with more use cases, more locations, more traffic, and more networks. In response, teams must be able to scale their coverage and operational capacity.
• End-to-end visibility. Gaining end-to-end visibility of networks that support critical services is essential to managing transformations and service levels. To speed mean time to resolution (MTTR) when issues arise, teams need end-to-end visibility that spans internal infrastructure and all the networks that services rely upon, including those managed by third-party service providers.
• Predictive insights to boost resilience. Ensuring optimal resilience and performance for critical patient and caregiver services is critical. As networks get increasingly complex, dynamic, and interdependent, addressing these objectives continues to get more difficult. Consequently, teams can’t continue to operate in fire-drill mode; they need insights that uncover problematic trends, so teams can take mitigation and remediation efforts—before critical services are affected.

NetOps teams in healthcare can establish effective, end-to-end network monitoring and comprehensive visibility—including of any internal or external networks that user transactions rely upon. That strategy can help teams optimize operations, speed issue identification, and enhance patient, staff, and caregiver experiences.

In practice, a large healthcare provider in the Northeast United States sought help from Broadcom as they evaluated and launched a project to host an Epic EHR system for regional healthcare centers and hospitals. As adoption of the new service grew, they needed to scale rapidly. In short order, they had to support more than 250 remote medical offices and clinics, which all had different ISPs, networks, and levels of technical expertise.

Through the enhanced visibility from AppNeta by Broadcom, the NetOps team was able to optimize the provider’s operations by delivering improved service levels and reducing bandwidth usage by 15%. Leveraging the solution’s end-to-end visibility, they were able to significantly reduce the time and effort dedicated to manual investigation, which translated to dramatic improvements in operational efficiency.

Today, Broadcom solutions enable Experience-Driven NetOps in all of our customers. Our industry-leading network monitoring software expands visibility beyond the traditional network edge and into ISP, SaaS, and cloud provider networks.

To find out more and see another example, read the full story here.