Why Healthcare Organizations Should Undergo a Networking Health Check

What Networking Challenges Do Healthcare Organizations Face?

In recent years, an increasing number of wireless devices have been connected to hospitals’ production networks to enable clinical mobility. These include ultrasounds, imaging devices, workstations on wheels, handheld devices and more. This growing number of devices can put a strain on healthcare organizations’ physical and wireless networks. Depending how many devices there are, it can even lead to a degradation in service, which not only impacts patient care but can also decrease patient satisfaction with the overall healthcare experience.

Patients and their families expect to have Wi-Fi in public spaces such as hospitals, whether they are on the ambulatory or acute side. Imagine that a patient is sitting in a waiting room for 30 minutes because their physician is 15 minutes behind, and there’s no Wi-Fi. Imagine a family member receiving care in the IV transfusion clinic, and there’s no Wi-Fi for them to use while they sit for what could be hours. People can become significantly frustrated when there is not good network access, especially in locations that have poor cellular connectivity. We expect Wi-Fi at places like automotive repair shops where we spend time waiting, and this same expectation applies to healthcare organizations. We are in a day and age where we expect Wi-Fi, 5G connectivity or cellular connectivity to be there and working.

To prevent a strain on bandwidth, organizations may consider adding a private 5G network. In addition to reducing the load on the Wi-Fi network, offloading clinical engineering, biomedical and other patient care devices onto a 5G network rather than having them exist on a shared network can better protect the organization from cyberattacks. Patients can stream Netflix on the guest Wi-Fi network, clinicians can access the EHR on the primary Wi-Fi network and important medical devices can be secured on a private 5G network.

The 5G network can also be used for disaster recovery. If the primary network drops, clinicians can still access the EHR via the private, fail-safe 5G network to ensure continuity of care.

READ MORE: Network assessments support healthcare modernization.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Impact Healthcare Networks?

Artificial intelligence is both a benefit and a load on healthcare networking.

AI is being used to shape, prioritize and redirect traffic on networks almost instantaneously. For example, Cisco is using the tech to monitor and optimize networks based on real-time traffic patterns. Healthcare IT teams can prioritize traffic from clinical communication and the EHR, which are directly tied to patient care, over traffic related to backups.

On the other hand, AI consumption of network bandwidth is increasing. The application of AI and machine learning to existing data sets on the networking, compute processing, transmission of data back and forth, and advanced reporting mechanisms all put additional strain on the network.

What Is a Networking Health Check, and How Does It Help?

It’s as important to understand the health of your network as it is to understand the posture of your security. It’s even as important as understanding the baseline health of your EHR. The network is the backbone of healthcare. It is the way organizations connect all of their clinical systems, whether that be the EHR, radiology imaging system, an ambulatory system or something else. Clinicians and healthcare staff connect to all of those tools through the network.

To optimize your health system’s network, you need to have visibility into your network. CDW’s Networking Health Check helps organizations identify outdated or end-of-life hardware and determine recommendations for rapid improvement. We’ll look at a hospital’s network, prioritize the organization’s needs and come up with actionable steps to mitigate the findings.

RELATED: Wi-Fi 6E improves healthcare productivity, speed and security.

Some of the things we look for during the Networking Health Check are aging network technology that could cause a failure, how new networking technology is working with existing technology when an organization expands, and the level of traffic on a network.

Conducting regular network audits is one of the most basic IT health checks healthcare organizations should be doing. It’s the equivalent of a patient seeing their primary care physician every year for an annual checkup. That’s how critical it is.

It’s not something an organization can do once and forget about. Organizations should run penetration testing regularly to assess their always-changing security posture, and networks require similar attention. Hospitals expand, undergo construction, experience mergers and acquisitions, and add new devices: All of these events can impact the network. If an organization doesn’t have a robust team that is always monitoring its network and governing it completely, then a Networking Health Check can’t hurt.

This article is part of HealthTech’s MonITor blog series.