Hospital networks and patient safety

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High-frequency polling is the key to rapid response

The network plays a vital role in healthcare delivery. Hospitals and clinics rely on the continuous operation of IP-enabled devices, such as ventilators, anesthesia machines, and telemetry systems – even a brief network disruption or delay can present a risk to patient safety. Everyday operations, such as telehealth services, electronic health records, and communications all require the network not just to be up, but also functioning at 100%.

For your mission-critical systems, checking network performance and availability every five, ten or fifteen minutes simply isn’t enough. You need high-frequency (60-second) polling, near real-time monitoring, and maintain stable, and predictable, network performance across your institution’s critical systems.

When every second counts, you need more meaningful data

Minimizing network latency is essential: when your network slows down, everything slows down. For some sectors this can present little more than a minor annoyance, but in healthcare even a short delay can make a difference to patient outcomes. If a doctor can’t access medical records, a remote monitoring alarm is missed, or an online consultation is interrupted, standards of care and service are impacted, and compliance can be put at risk.

You need to know that your network is optimized and performing properly to keep technologies, services and people connected. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Use a network monitoring solution that not only gives you complete visibility of your network, but also provides you with anomaly detection, accurate future predictions and intelligent near real-time information – not just a pile of data – that empowers you to swiftly and accurately make meaningful business decisions.

For example, by measuring round-trip time (RTT), you know exactly how long it takes for a data packet to be sent, plus the amount of time it takes for an acknowledgment of that signal to be received. You can then identify any potential bottlenecks and take remedial action. Because RTT only measures data packet transport time, it’s a reliable indicator of network performance, independent of the application, application server, or device being used.

Along with RTT, you also can use other metrics to monitor real-time network performance to determine the quality of connectivity being achieved. Jitter, for example, can affect VoIP and video quality for your critical business services.

Using Statseeker to monitor your healthcare network

1. Get real-time anomaly alerts
   Unusual activity or traffic volume on your network? Data packets with errors? Intermittent problems with device performance? Statseeker’s 60-second polling provides early alerts to any behavioral change as soon as it happens, so you can react sooner and resolve network issues before they escalate into outages.
   
2. Monitor and measure vital latency data
   Now you can proactively manage network performance to maintain low latency, minimal jitter, and high reliability for critical healthcare applications. Statseeker provides key metrics (such as RTT, jitter, and packet loss) and enables you to deploy observability appliances in multiple locations.
   
3. See the complete picture
   Statseeker’s SNMP integration and custom data types (CDT) functionality enable you to monitor medical devices and IT infrastructure seamlessly. It gives you centralized visibility and the ability to customize monitoring packages, so you can maintain continuous operations and optimize patient care delivery across complex, multi-vendor healthcare environments.
   
4. Keep pace with network growth
   Statseeker is fast, scalable and flexible, delivering near real-time results from a minimal server footprint. It can monitor networks of any size, collecting network data such as SNMP and ping, NetFlow (sFlow and J-Flow), syslog and SNMP trap messages; as well SDN configuration and health metrics.