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Healthcare Improves Performance of Their Telemedicine Service With NETSCOUT
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Remote Patient Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The healthcare organization was a long-time user of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution to help maintain the quality, availability, and reliability of their clinical applications and services, including Cerner electronic medical records and their Telemedicine platform. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented them with several additional network and application assurance challenges. Patients with non-COVID-19- related healthcare afflictions that needed to be addressed increased use of their cloud-based Telemedicine services. In fact, daily use of this telemedicine app grew more than tenfold initially and only continued to expand in providing virtual appointments and follow-ups for patients. Staff was equally enthusiastic over the benefits of its use and expectations for long-term benefits in healthcare delivery. From an IT perspective, this created an increase in traffic across the corporate environment and over their Internet Service (ISP) links and needed to be managed to ensure the quality of each telemedicine session. Further, in a patient survey, low scores and comments were reported for the Telemedicine service based on poor quality calls, background noise, jitter, and dropped calls that had made sessions unproductive, inefficient, and frustrating for patients, and doctors alike.
About The Customer
This not-for-profit healthcare system in the western United States supports both a health plan program as well as a community of more than twenty hospitals and 150 clinics. It takes the herculean efforts of more than 40,000 skilled and dedicated caregivers to deliver services to hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Networking services and clinical applications are the priority for the healthcare’s IT staff. They rely heavily on several applications and services, including electronic medical records, telemedicine. and voice over IP (VoIP), to provide quality patient care, flexible communication with their patients, and time-sensitive consultation with peers, staff, and family members on diagnosis and treatment options. Slowdowns or outages with these services and the many others used throughout the healthcare system, are to be avoided and if they do occur, need to be triaged and repaired quickly.
The Solution
As a current NETSCOUT customer, this healthcare provider was able to extend the value of their existing investment to support the Telemedicine project when their IT team added InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) 9000 and 2600 series certified software appliances to their nGeniusONE implementation for deployment in their data centers and hospitals respectively. As strong outsource proponents, the IT team also selected NETSCOUT’s managed service program, nGenius Visibility as a Service (nGenius VaaS) to implement, configure, and manage the new equipment. Initially, the nGenius VaaS experts configured monitoring of the Telemedicine service as hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Within a short period of time, the Telemedicine company moved their service to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Having selected NETSCOUT, in part, due to their Visibility without Borders architecture, the IT team was relieved to see the continuity in Telemedicine application monitoring with a simple configuration change by the nGenius VaaS staff. Based on the patient survey results, the nGenius VaaS team worked with the Healthcare’s IT team to identify capacity issues in the data center and hospitals that led to the issues with dropped calls, jitter, and quality issues. Knowing where capacity changes were needed, based on evidence in their own network, to support the ten-fold increase in Telemedicine use, helped the IT organization to deliver higher-quality experiences for their patients.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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