Healthcare organizations continue to invest in cutting-edge solutions to enhance their patient care delivery. This technological innovation often improves both the worker and patient experience, but it’s important to repeatedly monitor IT performance. Through successful IT performance management, organizations are able to thrive.
With a system in place, healthcare organizations can efficiently manage processes and adjust when needed. Bryan McDowell, vice president and CSO at University Hospitals of Cleveland, stated, “With a 3:1 ratio of devices to people in a healthcare setting, organizations must make network monitoring a priority to ensure patient safety and continuity of care.” Additionally, B. McDowell added it’s important to emphasize monitoring for healthcare networks, since it’s difficult to place controls on medical devices.
Mike McDowell, senior sales engineer at SolarWinds, said while healthcare IT is complex and multi-faceted, there are solutions to help simplify the management of devices. M. McDowell said, “Performance monitoring makes sure devices are not only up and healthy or that web applications are loading but also that compliance standards are being adhered to, whether that’s HIPAA, PCI, or SOX.”
IT solutions can help healthcare providers in several ways. In addition to simplifying IT management, they can help manage configurations to reduce network and system vulnerabilities, optimize remote and on-site service delivery to support users, monitor IT logs and events, and manage virtual LAN (VLAN) configurations to protect medical devices.
One example where management is valuable in systems is through access control lists (ACLs). By making “sure that your devices are segregated, you will know if something terrible were to happen and be able to mitigate the risk for all the different networking pieces,” said M. McDowell. “If one area gets compromised, it can’t talk to the other devices on your other VLANs. When you make sure that you have specific ACLs on all of your devices, you can create a compliance piece for that part and have all the devices have the same configuration on them or even snippets of the configuration.”
Hospitals face many challenges in delivering quality patient care—this can be seen when it comes to securing certain medical devices—but IT performance management services allows for greater control. Healthcare systems are able to better secure and operate their networks and devices through the continuous management of their IT performance.
