Whether in hospitals, clinics or private practices, healthcare providers perform a delicate balancing act everyday — providing quality healthcare, assuring patient safety and confidentiality, reducing medical errors and complying with a slew of government regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) — while simultaneously trying to minimize costs and enhance services.
For the past few years, healthcare organizations have struggled to make healthcare more affordable and efficient by making information more accessible to nurses, doctors and patients; enabling real-time, remote diagnoses; and improving billing systems. Traditionally, that has meant quickly constructing islands of ad-hoc wired and wireless voice, video and data networks on-site and at remote locations.
While that approach seemed reasonable in the past, recent developments have made it unsupportable such as the need for end-to-end visibility to assure compliance with global security and privacy mandates and to streamline business processes. The past few years have also seen a need for speed in deploying new enterprise-wide applications to compete with alternative healthcare providers, a requirement that is severely impeded when systems are disconnected from each other.
Add to this that health care is one of the most highly regulated industries throughout the world with stringent requirements for end-to-end data security and privacy and it is very clear that CIOs and their IT teams need to grab hold of their networks and manage and secure them as a unified whole.
As a first step to solving this problem, CIOs and their teams have consolidated infrastructure and staffing into data centers, serving up applications, storage and expertise to remote and branch sites from centralized resource pools. While these are excellent first steps, healthcare organizations must also consider the benefits of leveraging centralized management to automate deployment, providing configuration and oversight of the data center and remote operations.
Below are eight tips organizations can use as they begin to deploy centralized network management projects:
1. Assess your environment. It’s critical that you understand the environment you’re going to be managing and what technologies will be involved, including wired and wireless voice, video and data. Carefully consider your current inventory of resources and think about what will need to be augmented or replaced. Also, examine the expertise of your staff and if you’ll need to add people or send your team to training to get up to speed.
2. Keep the focus on patient care. While there are a wide range of technology solutions for healthcare institutions, make sure you choose the one that will integrate effortlessly with third-party systems and enable medical and technical professionals and providers to focus their efforts and their budgets on patient care rather than learning how to use advanced technologies.
3. Select an integrated, standards-based solution. Convenience and seamlessness are prime considerations when selecting a network management solution. Staff and patients must have flexibility in terms of reciprocity among all health providers and centers within the system. To be effective, a network management solution needs connects with Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) applications and creates easy access to the most widely used medical communications tools today such as Blackberry devices, PDAs and wireless phone systems.
4. Plot out your project. Before you commit to any product, make sure to work with your vendor on exactly what the network management deployment will entail. Are you going to need to upgrade drivers, operating systems, hardware and other infrastructure beforehand? And how much staff will you have to dedicate to the initial testing and rollout?
5. Phase in the implementation. Ease into your rollout – don’t try to manage everything all at once. You’ll want to get used to the tools and have time to set appropriate policies as well as thresholds for alerts.
6. Baseline your environment. Once you have your network management tool in place, it’s critical to mark the baseline in terms of configuration and infrastructure performance. If you can identify normal operating conditions then you’ll be able to use the management tools to spot deviations. You’ll also have a benchmark for the state it should be restored to if issues arise.
7. Think hard about your reporting. Reporting is one of the most beneficial parts of centralized network management so make sure you take time to figure out what information is relevant and will be used. For instance, if you fall under Sarbanes-Oxley, then set your controls for the act’s requirements. You can also use the tools to report on user activities if necessary.
8. Revisit and optimize. You should always be revisiting your network management tools to make sure they are at the optimal settings. Use the reports and baselines to tweak your environment so that you are taking full advantage of the automation and oversight these tools provide.
By following these eight steps, CIOs can effectively leverage centralized network management when making strategic decisions that ensure the future of their healthcare organization, ensuring that confidential information is secure, yet accessible, and reliably delivered anywhere, anytime, around the corner or around the world. Combined with a high-performance voice and data network solutions, healthcare providers can improve productivity, reduce administrative burdens, lower the total cost of ownership, and help comply with government regulations.
TerryAnn Fitzgerald, healthcare solutions marketing manager for 3Com, works with healthcare providers and hospital IT professionals to streamline networking management and infrastructure improvements. 3Com healthcare networking solutions intelligently enable real-time access to medical information and treatment protocols, while providing 24/7 security, availability and reliability that is mandatory to delivering the highest quality of patient care, safety and satisfaction.
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Patrick Barnard
