From diagnosis to prescription, each facet of healthcare delivery hinges on the reliability of digital infrastructure in assuring the patient-care experience. Technical issues can impact diagnostic tests, disrupt scheduling, impair the delivery of prescription services, damage campus-wide communications, and ultimately, harm the patient-care experience.
To prevent this type of risk, health system IT departments need an independent means to monitor the health of their clinical and business applications. Just as patients often need to see a physician to establish baselines and pre-existing conditions, IT professionals similarly require data to diagnose the health of their network and applications – and to alert them when issues like high latency deviate beyond the norm.
Constant visibility prevents network availability issues and performance degradations in clinical applications
Electronic medical records (EMR) allow hospital and health system employees to have swift, secure, continuous digital access to patient history, known conditions, existing prescriptions, and insurance coverage to assist in prompt, safe, and secure patient treatment. HIPAA regulations mandate this. Additionally, following the pandemic, contact centers have gained importance in healthcare, and voice-over IP (VoIP) and video communications services are essential in care diagnosis, treatment instructions, and speaking with patients and families.
Imagine a situation where a doctor is briefing parents on their child’s medical condition, ready to seek permission for surgery when the call suddenly disconnects.
Disruptions, network bandwidth constraints, and performance degradations like this still happen, and interrupted delivery, poor-quality conversations, connection delays, or dropped video calls can pose a major issue, impeding on physician productivity, leading to delayed patient treatment and eroding trust with patients and their families.
As health systems invest in telehealth and e-prescription technologies, customer expectations rise for enhanced digital experiences. Poor service delivery, especially in remote rural areas, risks patient migration to other providers. Additionally, slow or unavailable e-prescription applications can delay medication delivery, affecting treatment plans and potentially leading to revenue loss for hospitals.
To prevent performance issues, monitoring the performance of clinical applications that support EMRs and voice and video services can be done if IT teams implement methods that provide them with visibility across all service applications. For example, by tapping their network to provide visibility into the network traffic and packets connecting their applications, services, and infrastructure, IT teams can begin to better diagnose the root cause of performance issues more quickly and accurately. Unlike traditional network tools, which may not provide the necessary level of detail and insight into application behavior, packet-level visibility and analysis at scale makes it easier to pinpoint the exact source of performance issues, such as lagging video as part of telehealth consultations, or delayed access to medical records.
That’s because packet-level visibility allows for the analysis of individual conversations and network traffic, enabling IT teams to troubleshoot network issues more effectively by examining what is actually happening – thus understanding root cause and resolving issues more quickly. Plus, IT teams can use this data to configure dashboards and workflows for alerts, troubleshooting, and reports on critical applications while continuously monitoring and improving their network services.
Real-time analysis ensures interoperability in healthcare-specific protocols
In recent years, healthcare vendors have rolled out support for standards like HL7® FHIR® and other versions to provide safe and secure data transfer between compatible applications. It is the foundation upon which healthcare IT teams can connect their networked applications across various vendors and hosting environments.
And yet, IT departments need to identify the components involved in application outages quickly and pinpoint faults that may occur across various domains and vendors. Suppose there are issues with applications that are connected with HL7 FHIR. In that case, packet-level data can help IT teams identify problems, such as misconfigurations or network issues, and ensure that highly sensitive data hasn’t been compromised.
The process involves monitoring HL7 traffic and applying deep packet inspection at scale for real-time metadata analysis and traffic flow across all service domains. Without this level of visibility, IT may operate in the dark when attempting to isolate and prevent performance issues. Furthermore, your network monitoring tool must be able to interpret and understand the HL7 FHIR protocols to be truly effective.
Additionally, network data is being underutilized in managing the performance and security of operations, so this level of visibility provides substantial security advantages, enabling swift and efficient threat detection and response of applications within the network. For example, IT can leverage data analytics as an early warning system for potential incidents. In the event of a ransomware attack or data breach, they can retroactively analyze stored network data to determine how their system was compromised.
Prioritize patient safety by reducing downtime
Ensuring the reliable performance of clinical applications is crucial, as they directly contribute to timely treatment administration and positive outcomes, and disruptions can cause critical delays in treatment.
Thankfully, by employing advanced monitoring techniques that find the root cause of clinical application performance issues, such as degradations of EMRs and medical imaging systems, IT teams can help guarantee the optimal speed, efficiency, and security of the technologies across hospitals and health systems, thereby contributing to the well-being of patients.
About Eileen Haggerty
As area vice president of product and solutions marketing, Eileen Haggerty is responsible for working with enterprise customers to ensure that NETSCOUT’s service assurance and cybersecurity solutions are meeting the needs of our customers and the market.
Prior to her current NETSCOUT position, Haggerty held several product management and marketing roles at the company. Before joining NETSCOUT, she worked in a variety of technical marketing roles at Motorola Codex, Racal Data Group, and Celox Networks. Haggerty has an MBA from Boston College.