U.S. University Hospital Improves Visibility for Quality Application Assurance With NETSCOUT
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
- NETSCOUT® software-based InfiniStreamNG® appliances
- nGenius® Visibility as a Service
Tech Stack
- Network Monitoring
- Data Analytics
- Service Assurance
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
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
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
This university-affiliated U.S. hospital functions as the primary tertiary care and Level 1 Trauma Center in its service region, while also engaged in numerous, high-profile COVID-19 research projects. Its main campus hosts cancer, neurosciences, heart, ambulatory surgical, and children’s care services. As a teaching hospital, the main campus also includes schools for nursing, health technology management, dental medicine, and social welfare programs. A strategy of increasing their alliances with other regional hospitals has expanded their scope of operations to nearly 1,000 beds.
The Challenge
The hospital had been relying on a vendor's tools for network troubleshooting and trend reporting. However, the performance of the vendor's installed data sources was becoming unreliable, leading to issues with accessing packet-level forensic data for troubleshooting and reporting. This was exacerbating the challenges to stay ahead of disruptions and effectively extending the time to troubleshoot patient care-impacting issues. These issues became more pronounced just as the hospital had begun adding new healthcare entities and applications. Early application and Wi-Fi network issues at one remote location had already been reported to IT. Facing these collective technology issues and their impact on healthcare delivery, IT leadership began examining other vendor solution approaches available to the organization.
The Solution
After a deliberate organizational review, leadership made the decision to transition to the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, including software-based InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart data sources that improved real-time visibility across its main campus and remote facilities. With these ISNG appliances generating smart data in real-time from the hospital’s network traffic for consumption by nGeniusONE, IT resources for the first time had access to real-time views required for monitoring wide area network (WAN), softwaredefined WAN (SD-WAN), and virtual private network (VPN) performance. They also had easy-to-use application performance monitoring workflows to assure performance of clinical healthcare applications, including GE MUSE NX Cardiac information management, Cerner PowerChart, and other apps used by doctors and hospital staff for care delivery. Deeper views into performance of business services, including Voice over IP, Unified Communications voice & video, and Microsoft Office 365 apps were also provided. Granular visibility into how the Citrix environment was supporting remote applications, with monitoring of NetScaler gateways, XenApp server, and External Citrix gateway infrastructure was also achieved. An improved understanding of how service enabler performance impacts overall service delivery, with nGeniusONE monitoring DNS, DHCP, Health Layer 7 (HL7), and digital imaging and communication (Dicom) services was also provided.
Operational Impact
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