The health care industry is transforming at an unprecedented rate, new technologies are now used in both patient care and administration. Data Sharing Initiatives, combined with evolving, high bandwidth applications need to be managed for successful and smooth operations.

Needing to share information across a variety of hospitals, campuses, clinics, departments and doctor’s offices is essential. And it is complicated by the fact that hospitals, surgeries and clinics are often geographically separated. As a result, healthcare organizations have become highly dependent on their evolving network. On hospital campuses, communication among doctors, nurses, insurance agents and pharmacies are typically performed over 10 Gigabit or Gigabit Ethernet LANs, while those with provider coverage headquarters are done with high-speed WAN circuits. Connectivity is often completed over lower speed WAN connections to local clinics and remote doctor’s offices.

Nxtera can help ensuring the efficient delivery of mission critical applications and services, among hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices. When patient records and test results are unavailable, time critical treatment may be jeopardized.

Optimizing bandwidth availability across a hospital campus and network is more than a cost saving activity particularly when it is necessary to support latency-intolerant services. Effective traffic engineering of WAN circuits also means ensuring that capacity is available when needed by bandwidth intensive, applications specific to health care.

NetScout Performance  Manager in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations have used NetScout monitoring devices in their headquarters and data centers along with a mix of LAN and WAN monitoring devices on the circuits that communicate with member hospitals and clinics. To meet the challenges associated with converged networks, NetScout displays virtual circuits and their associated QoS simultaneously, ensuring that data, voice and video applications are properly mapped to the right QoS class and that the network is properly configured to meet business needs. In addition, by utilizing site monitoring capabilities, healthcare organizations can gain complete visibility into remote locations  on the MPLS network from a WAN perspective, providing the much needed application-level visibility for capacity planning and troubleshooting that is commonly masked with MPLS.

NetScout’s application services dashboard and early-warning system provides at-a-glance status of application services health and intelligently alerts the network team to impending crises long before users call the help desk in panic or frustration. By identifying application-specific flows across the network and state of services, it provides the information necessary to rapidly diagnose the where, what & why of a problem and to more quickly take corrective action. Dynamic and self-learning, it also automatically identifies significant deviations from normal network and application behavioral patterns, including link and application utilization and key performance indicators such as application response time, errors and VoIP degradations, and provides evidence of root cause. By finding problems earlier in the lifecycle, IT Operations can reduce MTTR and decrease the potential for disruption of the business by preserving productivity levels

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager in healthcare

Performance monitoring capabilities are expanded, enabling better visibility and control over mission-critical network and application resources. Operations manager is able to ensure that all servers, and critical services such as Citrix are performing as specified, and warn of any potential failures picked up in system logs, by WMI queries, slow responses or by its agent.