| Alexandra Sewell, Executive Director, Emerging Markets, Comcast Business |
Improving patient outcomes is a key driver of new technologies established to enable the continuity of patient care. Healthcare no longer begins and ends with a doctor’s visit. With the advent of patient portals, telemedicine initiatives and health monitoring through wearables, patient care is not a finite concept. It’s evolving as technology advances to meet patient needs.
Many foundational elements that support “digital healthcare” are here today, and the latest technologies require a strong network backbone to ensure peak network performance. Sufficient network capacity and speed are critical for supporting advanced healthcare technologies and applications such as electronic health records (EHRs), picture archive and communications systems (PACS) and telemedicine. Concurrent with the explosion of healthcare applications and technologies, IT healthcare professionals face additional challenges relating to security of patient data and scalability for the future.
Challenge: Data capacity
Sufficient bandwidth is a challenge for many organizations, but in healthcare, the requirements of Meaningful Use – specifically, the conversion of paper records to digital versions that need to be stored and shared on a network – create additional data capacity and data connectivity challenges.
The sheer size and volume of healthcare data files (EHRs, imaging files, digital pathology, medication records, etc.) place stress on the network, especially when large files need to be transmitted within the hospital and across the healthcare ecosystem to other hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies and other health management stakeholders. A single MRI file, for example, can be 5 gigabytes large, and by 2016, it’s expected that the capacity needed to store medical images alone will cross the 1 exabyte mark (that’s 1 billion gigabytes).
The introduction and adoption of new healthcare applications such as advanced point-of-care devices, remote monitoring and diagnostics, and HD video consultation apps are also driving network traffic growth, resulting in stressed infrastructures that create demand for high-performance networks. In addition, more healthcare systems are moving to the cloud, which requires much more bandwidth than using similar applications on an organization’s traditional local area network.
The increasing use of mobile devices to provide patients with anywhere, anytime access to their information is another issue healthcare IT professionals need to consider when evaluating their network infrastructure. Healthcare professionals and patients are no longer just accessing the organization’s network from desktop and personal home computers. Laptops, tablets and smartphones are also used to help deliver and receive quality care, all of which place additional bandwidth requirements on the network.
Patients are creating network demand as they access online portals and telemedicine applications. Virtual medicine kiosks and mobile e-health devices are allowing patients to receive professional care outside hospital walls. All of these factors result in the need for a robust network infrastructure, which is critical for managing the transfer of real-time data, video and voice to and from remote locations.
Challenge: Speed and performance
In healthcare, seconds count. Systems and applications such as EHRs, PACS imaging, telemedicine and telesurgery need to operate at peak performance. But legacy networks may not have the capability to support these mission-critical applications, especially when accessed from remote clinics and doctor offices.
Consider medical imaging. Physical distances often separate healthcare facilities, imaging facilities and data centers. Transferring large imaging files can consume substantial amounts of bandwidth, often subjecting the network to greater lag times when viewing and transferring these files. These slowdowns can cause fragmented, unreliable access and long wait times, which hinder a caregiver’s ability to collaborate when attempting to diagnose and treat patients.
When these locations connect through separate network providers, data transfer may incur additional lag from the translations and conversions each individual network needs to make. This can slow down access further.
Challenge: Security
The security of private patient data is a primary concern for all health IT decision makers and the providers they support. As healthcare organizations and individual clinicians increase their use of mobile technologies and cloud applications and continue to expand their bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, the likelihood of a large-scale security breach is compounded.
Healthcare organizations must comply with HIPAA to maintain protected health information and PCI DSS, a set of data security standards set forth by the Payment Card Industry to protect patient payments made with credit and debit cards. To comply with these governmental regulations, healthcare organizations must implement systems to keep patient data secure and prevent data breaches. Such security systems may even extend to regulating employee access to the Web.
Not all data security issues are related to mobility, however. Building redundancy in the network is vital to ensure that records remain secure should there be a service outage or a catastrophic event. It’s recommended that IT professionals install multiple connections whenever possible.
Challenge: Scalability
It’s clear that technology will continue to advance, placing even more data demands on legacy networks, which may struggle to keep up and provide 21st-century medical care.
In addition to advances in technology, the past decade has seen providers aligning with health networks and those networks consolidating to realize economies of scale. This evolution further challenges IT professionals in terms of coordinating infrastructure across multiple locations, particularly when moving EHRs from local to centralized storage.
The explosion of Big Data in the clinical space is not the only issue driving the need for better network scalability. Indeed, smart building systems that manage water and energy use, fire and life safety systems, lighting, security, maintenance and other facility services will also need more bandwidth in the future as they become integrated into the “digital” hospital environment.
The solution: Ethernet
To meet these burgeoning network challenges, many healthcare organizations are turning away from rigid, legacy networks such as T1 to Ethernet. Ethernet’s blend of capacity, security and scalability makes it ideal to support mission-critical, data-intensive healthcare applications, including mobile and cloud-based solutions.
With high bandwidth and low latency, Ethernet networks are designed to support the growing technology needs of healthcare organizations. Whether it’s supporting the transmission of patient records in real time or the ability to intelligently segment and prioritize different types of traffic to maximize performance, Ethernet is well suited to address the changing healthcare IT landscape.
- Ethernet provides several additional advantages:
- More cost effective than T1s or other similar technologies;
- Scales quickly and easily across multiple locations, so expanding network capacity is easy; and
- Special skills aren’t needed to manage Ethernet because it’s a familiar technology.
When looking for an Ethernet network provider, healthcare IT professionals would be wise to choose one that offers a private fiber-optic network with carrier-grade data and Internet services. Extra redundancy should be built into the network design to maximize availability. The network should also be robust enough to support multiple functions, including the ability to provide seamless connectivity between data centers for disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Data should always be transferred to and from data centers and cloud providers securely over the Ethernet provider’s network – and never over the public Internet.
