Medical Center Improves Application Performance With NETSCOUT VaaS

The medical center’s IT team was responsible for an increasing number of complex, patient impacting applications and systems used for electronic health records (EHR); including radiology and medical imaging, Health Layer 7 (HL7) interoperability, centralized blood management, oncology treatment, telehealth, storage management, and patient identity management. Their challenge was to provide pervasive visibility into the organization’s clinical applications for troubleshooting, application service assurance, and problem identification before they became disruptions. They were also dealing with existing issues with their Nuance PowerScribe, a voice-based application offering voice-to-text support for radiology reporting. Issues with this service were intermittent and frustrating to users and IT. Lacking visibility into unified communications (UC) technology and/or service dependencies, the IT team could not pinpoint root cause. From a networking perspective, the IT team needed visibility to troubleshoot and deliver service assurance for users connecting through their virtual private network (VPN) and VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. COVID-19 pandemic drove dramatic increases in use of telehealth services, collaboration tools (such as Zoom), and work-from-home for employees. This made reducing mean time (MTTR) to resolution with VPN and VDI issues that much more critical for the IT team. Gaining visibility into the organizations high-speed network as well as their VMware ESX environment was also essential.

This top U.S. health care organization maintains a network of hospitals, outpatient centers, clinics and specialty institutes that support more than 2 million annual patient visits with the support of 25,000 dedicated employees. Their renowned specialized services are delivered through their children’s hospital, psychiatric hospital, transplant center, rehabilitation hospital, cancer care system, and biomedical research center. Actively involved during the COVID-19 medical crisis, they conducted research & development on innovative treatment alternatives. Clearly, this organization relies heavily on their digital application services and network to perform their jobs every day.