The ability to provide excellent care to patients, to enable access to all medical records regardless of location, and processing transactions between customers, care facilities, insurance agencies and more, are all triggers for the increasing technology change in the healthcare industry today. With mergers and acquisitions on the increase, payments taking place online, and greater and greater amounts of data analytics needed, healthcare organizations need robust, scalable, secure, and easy to manage networking infrastructure that allows them to keep up with changing technology trends.
Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as a game changer for healthcare. It’s easy-to-deploy architecture allows organizations to implement it alongside or on top of any existing networking infrastructure, with any transport option available, and to any site regardless of location. With the shift to the use of cloud applications, SD-WAN allows any clinic, remote site, or hospital to quickly and seamlessly gain access to those applications.
We’ll take a closer look at healthcare in our four-part series – its unique use cases, patient pain points, and the unique functionality of SD-WAN that will continue to be a major force in this industry. We’ll start today with the trends and use cases that the VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is seeing in the industry today.
Availability and uptime: Networking availability and uptime are of the utmost importance in healthcare, even if it means additional expenditure. Depending on legacy networking and connectivity, outages and downtime were huge impediments to providing appropriate patient care or enabling transactions to occur. Customers that have adopted SD-WAN no longer have to worry that lack of connectivity will inhibit their healthcare organizations ability to meet demands.
Visibility: Healthcare IT teams now have the visibility into the traffic flowing across the network and ensuring critical applications are prioritized over less-critical. This is especially important in blackout/brownout situations, as SD-WAN is able to predict and remedy these situations, often repairing the lines to ensure connectivity stays consistent. It dynamically adjusts to the underlaying conditions and either steers or remediates the access and transport of these critical applications.
New Sites On-line: Healthcare is no longer relegated to major cities. There is a need to provide healthcare facilities in remote locations where greater numbers of patients can be served. Traditionally, turning up new sites was complex, due to a lack of connectivity options. SD-WAN has changed that as it can utilize any type of connectivity available (private and public links) and for faster deployment, can utilize LTE until other options can be obtained.
Growth by Merger and Acquisition: The number of mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry is increasing. In 2017 alone, there were 43 transactions. Following one of these situations, the individual companies must merge their systems, combining many disparate platforms to each other., which is a traditionally laborious and difficult task to complete. Initially, the lead company gives the M&A sites limited access to resources and once fully on-boarded, converts them to production standard and provide full access to production and existing corporate sites. However, with SD-WAN, this is no longer an issue, as each site can be brought into the existing network quickly and efficiently.
Standardization: One of SD-WAN’s features is its ability to centrally manage and control all sites in the network. Additionally, if policies or configurations must be implemented or modified, the central management orchestrator is able to deploy these changes automatically, without the need to send a trained technical staff to each location. This process also allows new sites or acquired locations to be deployed using standard templates or profiles to eliminate human error and speed up a go-live time.
Tossing Traditional: Traditionally, healthcare facilities relied on MPLS as the connectivity between sites and primary centers of data. MPLS is private and highly secure but is difficult to implement in every locations, especially smaller offices or clinics, due to its high cost. More and more, healthcare is shifting away from MPLS and adopting SD-WAN either alongside it or as a substitute when MPLS contracts run out. Hybrid WAN allows this shift to occur without compromising security and while keeping in compliance with HIPAA, SOC2, etc.
Segmenting Traffic: There are various forms of networking traffic, and each industry has its unique segments. In healthcare, there is likely to be three types of traffic: corporate traffic, guest traffic, and payment traffic. SD-WAN is able to segment this traffic so that each is routed to the correct destination regardless of point of origin. Corporate traffic is backhauled to the data center for UTM inspection. Guest traffic is dropped off location at each site. Payment traffic for services rendered, must be PCI compliant and routed the appropriate payment channel.
Join us soon for the second blog in this series: Healthcare Technology Part 2: Main Pain Points and Typical Profile.
The ability to provide excellent care to patients, to enable access to all medical records regardless of location, and processing transactions between customers, care facilities, insurance agencies and more, are all triggers for the increasing technology change in the healthcare industry today. With mergers and acquisitions on the increase, payments taking place online, and greater and greater amounts of data analytics needed, healthcare organizations need robust, scalable, secure, and easy to manage networking infrastructure that allows them to keep up with changing technology trends. 
Availability and uptime: Networking availability and uptime are of the utmost importance in healthcare, even if it means additional expenditure. Depending on legacy networking and connectivity, outages and downtime were huge impediments to providing appropriate patient care or enabling transactions to occur. Customers that have adopted SD-WAN no longer have to worry that lack of connectivity will inhibit their healthcare organizations ability to meet demands. 
