This is the second in a four-part series. To view “Healthcare and SD-WAN Part 1 – Trends and Use Cases,” click here. Today’s blog focuses on the main pain points faced by the healthcare industry and the typical profile of a healthcare company looking for SD-WAN as a potential solution to its networking issues.
Healthcare is no different than other industries in its reliance on the network to conduct business and serve its clientele. And as just like in other industries, the traditional wide area network (WAN) that it relies on is complex, static, unable or too slow in adapting to the changing dynamics required of Healthcare.
Healthcare Technology Pain Points
The digital transformation and expansion into the cloud is causing a major disruption in the Healthcare industry. To completely embrace this transformation and take advantage of all that if offers requires the industry to scrutinize the WAN and eliminate the obstacle that it poses by forcing adaptation to new technologies and platforms.
- Reliability and Security: The primary pain point in the Healthcare industry is the continuous challenge to provide reliable and secure access to information (patient medical records, medical imaging, etc.) to geographically diverse branch site types while remaining in compliance with industry regulations.
- Protected Health Information (PHI) is highly sensitive, which makes it extremely attractive to hackers who will go to great lengths to attain the information. The constant threats from this group require increasingly more sophisticated levels of security. This becomes even more complex when WAN architectures differ across various access groups and within each architecture as well as the difference amongst the different types of branch sites an organization might manage. This complexity and variance is a security and operational challenge.
- Network Visibility: Additionally, most networks lack a comprehensive and centralized management and monitoring portal that allows complete visibility of the WAN. To truly understand and optimize the WAN, IT managers must be able to measure and assess the application traffic flowing across the WAN as well as prioritize the individual applications while reporting on individual application performance. But this situation rarely exists in Healthcare organizations, making it difficult to identify issues, determine how to fix them, and plan for future activity and needs based on the current situation.
The Emerging Profile
So now that we understand the pain points faced in Healthcare, let’s take a look deeper into the typical customer profile that is emerging in Healthcare with regards to technology needs.
While every potential Healthcare customer varies slightly in the pain points they are looking to solve with SD-WAN, the network architecture across these customers is not significantly different from each other.
- Most have (typically two) centralized data centers that host applications or services.
- A set of regional hospitals or campuses and several remote clinics or urgent care clinics or individual doctor’s offices.
- Or, they do not have a main hospital or campus, but are made up of many remote clinics, doctor’s offices, or pharmacies providing specialized services.
The remote clinics can be fixed (meaning they are brick-and-mortar) or mobile. In both scenarios, the remote sites rely on VPN connectivity back to the main data centers. All traffic flow is to and from the regional hospital campus and remote clinics to the data center. The remote sites typically do not communicate with each other or send information to each other.
Considering the N-S traffic flow described in this Healthcare profile, the WAN becomes the lifeblood for those organizations that host required applications and services in the centralized data centers. Patient information must be available at all times in order for healthcare professionals to provide care to patients. This requires that the information be stored in the centralized data centers. Because care is provided at the remote sites or regional campuses, the information is uploaded or downloaded to the data centers on a continuous basis. The WAN must be able to support the large files that are constantly traversing it in a secure and efficient manner. The size of the files can be 100s of MB of data at a single time due to the high resolution required by imaging data and medical records.
Outages are detrimental to Healthcare as the inability to access patient records by care providers can cause them to be in breach of HIPAA regulations and unable to deliver care when needed.
The WAN Must Change
SD-WAN has become a saving grace for the Healthcare industry. Because it can be deployed Over-the-Top (OTT) or as a replacement to existing infrastructure, it is a highly flexible and scalable technology that enables Healthcare to continue providing patient care and supporting care personnel with improved efficiency, access, speed, and security.
Join us soon for the third blog in this series: Healthcare and SD-WAN Part 3: Why Providers Say “I gotta have SD-WAN!”
