NETSCOUT Case Studies Healthcare Identifies Cause of EMR Slowdown with NETSCOUT

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	Healthcare Identifies Cause of EMR Slowdown with NETSCOUT NETSCOUT

Healthcare Identifies Cause of EMR Slowdown with NETSCOUT

NETSCOUT

Technology Category	Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries	Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions	Maintenance Quality Assurance
Use Cases	Predictive Maintenance Remote Asset Management
Services	System Integration Testing & Certification
Challenge	The healthcare organization was facing a major challenge in determining the cause of slowdowns reported by doctors, clinicians, physical therapists, and nursing staff when trying to use their electronic medical record (EMR) application. The application is critical as it holds all the information related to their patient’s health, diagnosis, treatment history, medications, etc. The cause of the slowdown could be anywhere – the centralized data center, across the WAN links to the hospitals and clinics, the EMR itself, possibly with the Citrix services, or related due to something in the network at the hospitals or clinics or end-points. The IT staff was also struggling to establish application and network benchmark metrics for the services and communities necessary for understanding what represented normal, good-quality performance. They were also experiencing voice and unified communications (UC) issues, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) failures, and reports from their clinics regarding poor performance from voice and other services. Read More
About Customer	The customer is a United States healthcare organization that has seen spectacular growth in the last decade due to a greater number of patients requiring their specialized care, as well as through strategic mergers and acquisitions. Nearly 50,000 part-time and full-time employees provide wide-ranging medical services to patients, from urgent care and occupational medicine to outpatient physical rehabilitation and therapy. The healthcare organization’s enterprise network is complex, delivering treatment and applications to more than 125 hospitals and 1,500 clinics and health centers in almost all of the United States. With quality patient care as well as billions in revenue in the balance, the safe and secure delivery of patient treatment is a top priority for this healthcare organization – which means delivery of application services related to patient care is also critical. Read More
Solution	The IT staff performed a thorough evaluation of alternatives to gain visibility into the most pressing issues related to their EMR and Citrix services, voice quality and SIP trunking technology, and end-user slowdowns at remote hospitals and clinics. For comprehensive visibility, the IT team selected NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG software on custom-off-the-shelf (COTS) appliances, which is delivering smart data from packet analysis with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology for service assurance in their environment. In order to immediately benefit from their new visibility, the healthcare also contracted for nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS), which is helping to implement their nGeniusONE platform and configure the NETSCOUT® solution for immediate troubleshooting. Leveraging the nGeniusONE solution, along with their nVaaS experts, the troubleshooting concluded that they identified and monitored the custom EMR application including the application flows and tiers, which were previously unknown, to provide rapid response to slowness issues and errors with the service. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Applicable Industries

Healthcare & Hospitals

Applicable Functions

Maintenance

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Remote Asset Management

Services

System Integration

Testing & Certification

Challenge

The healthcare organization was facing a major challenge in determining the cause of slowdowns reported by doctors, clinicians, physical therapists, and nursing staff when trying to use their electronic medical record (EMR) application. The application is critical as it holds all the information related to their patient’s health, diagnosis, treatment history, medications, etc. The cause of the slowdown could be anywhere – the centralized data center, across the WAN links to the hospitals and clinics, the EMR itself, possibly with the Citrix services, or related due to something in the network at the hospitals or clinics or end-points. The IT staff was also struggling to establish application and network benchmark metrics for the services and communities necessary for understanding what represented normal, good-quality performance. They were also experiencing voice and unified communications (UC) issues, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) failures, and reports from their clinics regarding poor performance from voice and other services.

About Customer

The customer is a United States healthcare organization that has seen spectacular growth in the last decade due to a greater number of patients requiring their specialized care, as well as through strategic mergers and acquisitions. Nearly 50,000 part-time and full-time employees provide wide-ranging medical services to patients, from urgent care and occupational medicine to outpatient physical rehabilitation and therapy. The healthcare organization’s enterprise network is complex, delivering treatment and applications to more than 125 hospitals and 1,500 clinics and health centers in almost all of the United States. With quality patient care as well as billions in revenue in the balance, the safe and secure delivery of patient treatment is a top priority for this healthcare organization – which means delivery of application services related to patient care is also critical.

Solution

The IT staff performed a thorough evaluation of alternatives to gain visibility into the most pressing issues related to their EMR and Citrix services, voice quality and SIP trunking technology, and end-user slowdowns at remote hospitals and clinics. For comprehensive visibility, the IT team selected NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution with InfiniStreamNG software on custom-off-the-shelf (COTS) appliances, which is delivering smart data from packet analysis with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology for service assurance in their environment. In order to immediately benefit from their new visibility, the healthcare also contracted for nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS), which is helping to implement their nGeniusONE platform and configure the NETSCOUT® solution for immediate troubleshooting. Leveraging the nGeniusONE solution, along with their nVaaS experts, the troubleshooting concluded that they identified and monitored the custom EMR application including the application flows and tiers, which were previously unknown, to provide rapid response to slowness issues and errors with the service.

Impact #1	The IT team at this healthcare company is benefiting from a level of application and network visibility that they have never had before.
Impact #2	The healthcare organization is also realizing improved workflows, operational successes, and cost efficiencies using nGeniusONE to proactively monitor all their well-known, custom, and voice applications.
Impact #3	Their network operations, devops, and voice personnel are all benefiting from the single-pane-of-glass views to spot anomalies, errors and slowdowns as they occur, so they can be addressed before they become debilitating to their user community.

Impact #1

The IT team at this healthcare company is benefiting from a level of application and network visibility that they have never had before.

Impact #2

The healthcare organization is also realizing improved workflows, operational successes, and cost efficiencies using nGeniusONE to proactively monitor all their well-known, custom, and voice applications.

Impact #3

Their network operations, devops, and voice personnel are all benefiting from the single-pane-of-glass views to spot anomalies, errors and slowdowns as they occur, so they can be addressed before they become debilitating to their user community.

Benefit #1	Reduced Mean-Time-to-Resolve (MTTR) issues using nGeniusONE and nVaaS from NETSCOUT.

Benefit #1

Reduced Mean-Time-to-Resolve (MTTR) issues using nGeniusONE and nVaaS from NETSCOUT.

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Overview

Healthcare Identifies Cause of EMR Slowdown with NETSCOUT

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit