Healthcare organizations are enjoying the expansion of communications technology and data availability through the use of tools like medical internet of things (IoT) devices, mobile tablets, and remote devices that allow them to keep up to date on patient care and improve outcomes. As healthcare networks become more complex, network agility becomes more elusive.

Healthcare organizations are in a constant balancing act, trying to provide the latest information to patients and healthcare providers, while still prioritizing security and agility. These concerns may be even more pressing in a rural setting where organizations rely on smaller teams to handle a wide range of patient care. In addition, healthcare IT teams are considering how to address emerging needs like the following:

• Creating hybrid work environments that equip employees to seamlessly move from a home office to a hospital or clinic, with an identical level of connectivity and access to resources.
• Extend patient care and functionality beyond the physical location of the healthcare facility.
• Allow WiFi networks to be extended to when and where mobile healthcare is required.

These types of needs are increasing the focus around prioritizing network agility to meet a wide range of demands for healthcare IT. Organizations know that a complex or unstable network will hinder digital transformation strategies that allow them to improve patient care.

What Healthcare Networks Require

Network teams for healthcare organizations need increased control and visibility into how and when IoT and mobile devices are connecting. There’s a potential for greater control over how resources are provisioned, monitoring to protect against security threats, and better allocation of bandwidth for improved performance and productivity gains across the organization.

These improvements come with the introduction of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), an approach that virtualized the network and allows for traffic segmentation and prioritization. A central management dashboard allows network teams to improve redundancy and reliability and introduce automatic failover to address any potential outages, which is absolutely essential in healthcare networks.

SD-WAN’s primary benefit for healthcare is network agility, allowing IT teams to automatically route traffic based on its critical nature by using predetermined business policy to access the appropriate pathways. For instance, an email transmission would not require a real-time transmission, but a doctor providing telemedical care to patients would be prioritized to the most reliable, secure, and speedy connection.

SD-WAN also equips organizations for technologies like unified communications, which uses cloud-based communications technology to improve patient and provider experiences through rich features that include video conferencing.

As healthcare networks become more complex, many are facing unexpected costs. Choosing a managed services provider for SD-WAN allows organizations to treat it as a utility, simply paying a monthly subscription fee that includes not only the virtualized network, but also the management and troubleshooting that can drain IT teams. This equips healthcare teams to access the capacity needed while not overspending on devices and maintenance of the network.

Is your healthcare organization prioritizing network agility in the coming months? It may be that SD-WAN offers the features and benefits you need to gain more control over how your resources are being provisioned, identifying which devices are on your network and keeping WAN costs in check. Contact us at Cloud Source to learn more about what SD-WAN offers healthcare networks.