Keeping your IT off life support

The right support model enables healthcare providers to tackle some of their most pressing challenges

Healthcare is undergoing a revolutionary change. In the same way that antibiotics and medical imaging changed the way that healthcare is provided, so accelerated adoption of technology as an enabler of advanced healthcare is set to change the game.

The continued expansion of high-speed, software-defined networks and connected devices is enabling healthcare providers across the world to reimagine what world-class healthcare looks like. Using smart devices, from the simple heart rate monitor to smartwatches and connected insulin pumps, it’s now possible for caregivers to monitor patients remotely, enabling them to recover at home where they would have had to remain hospitalized in the past.

Enabling this requires taking advantage of a complex ecosystem of tools and solutions all working in concert to ensure that data is seamlessly and securely routed from the patient to systems leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. These systems ensure that caregivers are promptly alerted to any events that would require intervention.

Underpinning these capabilities is the next generation of software-defined infrastructure, enabling agile and flexible services, with the patient at the center. 

Making sense of an increasingly complex environment

While the services required by future connected healthcare solutions are driven by software-defined infrastructure, internal teams often don’t have the capabilities to properly support this expanding estate.

Healthcare is an extremely complex environment with onerous governance and compliance requirements established to protect patients’ personal data. IT teams inside healthcare environments are finding themselves torn between the need to leverage technology to meet changing patient needs while still closely monitoring the day-to-day performance of the underlying infrastructure.

This means that even though they have the required tools, they still don’t have the visibility and control they need to ensure optimized service levels and efficiency across the extended environment.

At the same time, they’re being asked to guide their colleagues on the best technologies to advance their medical strategy, finding ways to integrate new technology without disrupting the workflows of medical personnel.

Making life or death choices

While visibility is a challenge for all organizations, the healthcare sector creates an especially difficult environment as any kind of security breach or system failure could have fatal consequences.

Leveraging the data analytics capabilities of software-defined infrastructure is critical to the ability of organizations in this sector to make informed decisions about how they evolve their infrastructure strategy. Where the growth in usage is, what parts of the ecosystem are delivering the greatest value and identify potential vulnerabilities to ensure that no patient information is compromised.

Managing IT sprawl

In the past, organizations – both in the healthcare sector and beyond – have found that they’ve fallen foul of spiraling costs from untracked software assets and uncontrolled cloud spend. These are typically the result of the IT organizations looking to have the infrastructure in place to meet changes in demand but not having the skills and resources to optimize the management of their legacy hardware and software assets to ensure return on investment and consistent lifecycle management.

With this area out of control, the security and downtime risk can expose healthcare providers to critical service affecting incidents.