Download PDF
Canadian Public Healthcare Agency Supports Critical Patient-care Services through Actionable Intelligence
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The Canadian public healthcare agency was facing a challenge of ensuring 'always on' access to networks and applications for health organizations and providers. The IT team was under tremendous pressure to ensure its new electronic health record system and data centers offered flawless network connectivity with hundreds of patient care providers. The challenge IT faced was a lack of comprehensive visibility across its geographically dispersed, mission-critical data centers and both physical and virtual infrastructures. Network Operations had very limited tools for monitoring network and application performance. IT triage and troubleshooting would take hours, if not days to complete. This meant IT was spending upwards of 50 percent of its time on service issues, and in some cases the problems went unresolved far longer than acceptable. Due to the vast amounts of healthcare data and the complex, multitiered applications that were in use, it proved extremely arduous to pinpoint the root cause of application slowness – potentially impacting patient care.
About The Customer
The customer in this case study is a Canadian public healthcare agency. This agency is responsible for building and maintaining an electronic health record system and the data center(s) and networks the applications operate in. This comprises hundreds of sites to connect health organizations and sole practitioners nationwide. The system ties together repositories that securely store billions of healthcare records for fast and efficient patient care. For this healthcare agency, ensuring that health organizations and providers have “always on” access to networks and applications is vitally important to the quality of care. Critical services, such as lab results and digital imaging require service assurance.
The Solution
The IT team quickly realized they needed a better solution for monitoring their service delivery infrastructure, which would require data collection from two distinct environments – a VMware environment and a physical server environment. Recognizing they needed to avoid the inherent problems of multiple point tools for these two environments, they turned to NETSCOUT® to achieve this complex task of comprehensive, vendor independent, enterprise-wide visibility for service assurance. The nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform, with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, was used to deliver pervasive visibility across remote data centers, effectively extracting application and network performance metrics. nGenius Packet Flow Systems (PFS) and Taps solution family enabled IT to aggregate, replicate and manage the flows of traffic throughout the network for application performance monitoring. NETSCOUT architected a solution based on a vSTREAM virtual probe to capture full packet streams in the virtual environment and the nGenius PFS and InfiniStreamNG™ appliances for the physical environment and WAN.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Hospital Inventory Management
The hospital supply chain team is responsible for ensuring that the right medical supplies are readily available to clinicians when and where needed, and to do so in the most efficient manner possible. However, many of the systems and processes in use at the cancer center for supply chain management were not best suited to support these goals. Barcoding technology, a commonly used method for inventory management of medical supplies, is labor intensive, time consuming, does not provide real-time visibility into inventory levels and can be prone to error. Consequently, the lack of accurate and real-time visibility into inventory levels across multiple supply rooms in multiple hospital facilities creates additional inefficiency in the system causing over-ordering, hoarding, and wasted supplies. Other sources of waste and cost were also identified as candidates for improvement. Existing systems and processes did not provide adequate security for high-cost inventory within the hospital, which was another driver of cost. A lack of visibility into expiration dates for supplies resulted in supplies being wasted due to past expiry dates. Storage of supplies was also a key consideration given the location of the cancer center’s facilities in a dense urban setting, where space is always at a premium. In order to address the challenges outlined above, the hospital sought a solution that would provide real-time inventory information with high levels of accuracy, reduce the level of manual effort required and enable data driven decision making to ensure that the right supplies were readily available to clinicians in the right location at the right time.
Case Study
Gas Pipeline Monitoring System for Hospitals
This system integrator focuses on providing centralized gas pipeline monitoring systems for hospitals. The service they provide makes it possible for hospitals to reduce both maintenance and labor costs. Since hospitals may not have an existing network suitable for this type of system, GPRS communication provides an easy and ready-to-use solution for remote, distributed monitoring systems System Requirements - GPRS communication - Seamless connection with SCADA software - Simple, front-end control capability - Expandable I/O channels - Combine AI, DI, and DO channels
Case Study
Driving Digital Transformations for Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices
Diagnostic devices play a vital role in helping to improve healthcare delivery. In fact, an estimated 60 percent of the world’s medical decisions are made with support from in vitrodiagnostics (IVD) solutions, such as those provided by Roche Diagnostics, an industry leader. As the demand for medical diagnostic services grows rapidly in hospitals and clinics across China, so does the market for IVD solutions. In addition, the typically high cost of these diagnostic devices means that comprehensive post-sales services are needed. Wanteed to improve three portions of thr IVD:1. Remotely monitor and manage IVD devices as fixed assets.2. Optimizing device availability with predictive maintenance.3. Recommending the best IVD solution for a customer’s needs.
Case Study
HaemoCloud Global Blood Management System
1) Deliver a connected digital product system to protect and increase the differentiated value of Haemonetics blood and plasma solutions. 2) Improve patient outcomes by increasing the efficiency of blood supply flows. 3) Navigate and satisfy a complex web of global regulatory compliance requirements. 4) Reduce costly and labor-intensive maintenance procedures.
Case Study
Harnessing real-time data to give a holistic picture of patient health
Every day, vast quantities of data are collected about patients as they pass through health service organizations—from operational data such as treatment history and medications to physiological data captured by medical devices. The insights hidden within this treasure trove of data can be used to support more personalized treatments, more accurate diagnosis and more advanced preparative care. But since the information is generated faster than most organizations can consume it, unlocking the power of this big data can be a struggle. This type of predictive approach not only improves patient care—it also helps to reduce costs, because in the healthcare industry, prevention is almost always more cost-effective than treatment. However, collecting, analyzing and presenting these data-streams in a way that clinicians can easily understand can pose a significant technical challenge.