Healthcare Company Assures Private 5G LTE Environment with NETSCOUT Solutions

Customer Profile

This healthcare company provides industry-leading services to thousands of customers; including hundreds of hospitals, medical facilities, and doctors’ offices throughout North America. 

The existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was not meeting their needs; they required a solution that supported high bandwidth, low latency, and secure transactions. They also wanted a network that was prepared to handle the future workload of proactive patient monitoring, remote diagnostics with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) based training. Working with a vendor who purchased a CBRS PAL (Citizens Broadband Radio Services Priority Access License) allowed them to setup a private 5G network within their healthcare facilities. 

The Challenge

This enterprise company needed a secure, low latency, higher bandwidth private 5G solution and turned to NETSCOUT for the nGeniusONE, nGenius Session Analyzer (nSA), TrueCall and nGenius Business Analytics (nBA) toolsets. This provided them end-through-end visibility to all healthcare facilities, and services, across multiple locations in major U.S. cities, and enabled them to monitor their: 

• Critical Healthcare Applications 
• 5G Stand-Alone (SA) Control and User Plane Signaling 
• Voice over New Radio (VoNR) 

Within the healthcare facility, there are many different elements that this enterprise needs to monitor, and the NETSCOUT tools allow the customer to group them and provide end-through-end visibility enabling quick identification of these individual key infrastructure elements, and if they are experiencing latency or throughput issues. 

Solution in Action

The 5G support team of this healthcare customer set up multiple data centers, all equipped with high-capacity NETSCOUT software: InfiniStreamNG, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) model and virtualized vStream, nGeniusONE, nSA, TrueCall, and nBA applications. 

In order to properly ensure the experience and health of this new 5G network and services, the company used a combination of nSA, nGeniusONE, TrueCall, and nBA. The unified view of these separate resources provided by the NETSCOUT solution enables rapid determinations about which resource is involved in any one incident or performance bottleneck. 

Because the healthcare services are critical, the healthcare company engaged NETSCOUT Professional Services to deliver quick implementation and reduce the time to value. A Professional Services engineer initially focused on building dashboards and workflows for monitoring the variety of complex protocols in use and critical to the healthcare support teams.

The Results

The customer was extremely pleased that the NETSCOUT team was able to deliver the full range of the required parameters as outlined in their requirements. Sessions which failed, whether in the mobile backhaul network or in the healthcare applications, can be quickly identified with information provided about the timing and cause of the failure, lowering Mean Time to Knowledge (MTTK). 

This healthcare company can now provide their users a secure, continuously available, low latency, high bandwidth environment. Failed sessions can be spotted at session setup, during normal operation, and session teardown. The healthcare 5G support staff has complete visibility. 

The IT and 5G support teams can now proactively identify issues and resolve these problems quickly to protect critical network service for this massive scale healthcare environment helping to ensure on time delivery of patient services. Moving forward, the COTS and vStream model of deployment can flexibly scale to grow the monitoring solution incrementally. 

In addition, the NETSCOUT tools provide this healthcare customer with alerts to inform the 5G and IT support teams when there are issues with the wireless infrastructure, VoNR performance, or the healthcare applications. As their business continues to experience rapid growth, the 5G support group are confident in their ability to keep pace and maintain the availability and quality needed - thanks to NETSCOUT.