Healthcare Improves Performance of Their Telemedicine Service With NETSCOUT
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
- InfiniStreamNG® software appliances
- nGenius® Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS)
- nGenius® Visibility as a Service
Tech Stack
- Cloud-based Telemedicine service
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
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
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 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.
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
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
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.
