Overview
Healthcare Outlook
Visibility and Protection Throughout the Healthcare Environment
Healthcare's top priority is simple: deliver exceptional patient care, quickly and safely. Other priorities include cyber protection, revenue growth, medical staff productivity, increased patient visits, regulatory compliance, detection of anomalous activity and lateral movement, and cost control. As extensive consumers of information technology (IT), healthcare has led the way in high-speed bandwidth to support imaging services, adoption of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technology for wireless patient diagnostics, and use of innovative communications tools for patient portals and wearable medical technologies through the Digital Front Door.
The evolution of healthcare systems are revolutionizing patient care. Core clinical services rely on Electronic Medical / Health Records (EMR/EHR), Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), telemedicine / telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), e-prescriptions, and Health Layer 7 (HL7) interoperability services. As healthcare delivery becomes increasingly digital and interconnected, uninterrupted performance and security are non-negotiable. Strengthening observability and cyber resilience is essential to prevent unplanned disruptions and defend against an escalating threat landscape.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
The Challenge of Preventative Strategies in Healthcare Networks
The Need to Reduce Reactive Troubleshooting in Always-On Medical Networks
Unplanned downtime and degradations are serious dangers - seconds of delay can impact patient care. As preventative medicine improves outcomes, healthcare IT teams need proactive, preventative troubleshooting strategies to identify issues before they disrupt clinical services.
Lack of End-to-End Visibility Across Hybrid Environments
As complexity and digital dependency accelerates, gaps in network and application visibility impede effective troubleshooting, prolong outages, and make it difficult to isolate issues across today’s highly distributed healthcare ecosystem.
Rapid Detection of Anomalous Activity and Lateral Movement
High-value medical data makes healthcare networks are prime targets for malware, especially ransomware, and DDoS attacks. Closing visibility gaps that create opportunities for successful intrusions and data breaches give IT teams ways to prevent operational disruption and confidential data loss.
Increased Complexity Securing and Maintaining Performance of IoMT and Smart Devices
Use of IoMT devices spans smart phones, smart beds, tablets, and carts on wheels. Minor slowdowns or interruptions can impact clinical tests, diagnostics, and patient safety. Quickly determining whether an issue stems from IT performance, Wi-Fi connectivity, or a security threat makes proactive end-to-end observability essential.
Poor User Experience Impacts Both Patients and Medical Staff
Patient confidence and medical staff productivity suffer when there are disruptions accessing patient records, diagnostic tests, or e-prescriptions. Timely, high-quality user experience is challenged by complex hybrid infrastructure increasing the need for comprehensive observability.
Outcomes That Matter
The Importance of Observability When Seconds Matter in Healthcare Outcomes
Avoid or Reduce Dangerous Downtime in Healthcare Networks and Applications
NETSCOUT supports over 1,000 applications, including apps for patient records, telehealth services, e-prescriptions, imaging services, diagnostic tests, patient portals, and billing services. This helps IT rapidly identify and resolve application issues ecosystem.
Reduce Patient Impacting and Financially Damaging Cyber Incidents
As high-value patient data makes it a top cyber target, malware (e.g. ransomware) and DDoS attacks must be reduced. Rapid detection and response across healthcare environments from NETSCOUT reduces the risk of lateral movement, prevents operational disruption, exfiltration of confidential data, and minimizes financial impact and regulatory fines.
Improve User Experience and Optimize Revenue Opportunities At the Same Time
Whenever doctors and clinicians experience IT triggered delays, patient appointments may be reduced. Patient visits and revenue opportunities can be optimized with observability solutions to rapidly pinpoint issues with telehealth, patient records, and imaging services.
Eliminate the Need for Expensive, Unproductive War Rooms
With a single, vendor-independent, enterprise-wide observability solution, uptime can be improved and operational risks reduced in hospitals, remote medical offices, and hybrid infrastructure. Deep packet inspection, as the single source of truth, yields quick results from IT team and vendor partner collaboration.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Observability Investments
The goals are simple: avoid downtime, minimize cyber risks, reduce tool clutter, and safeguard technology investments. NETSCOUT helps future-proof your capital investments and optimize ROI with network observability and security solutions that meet your needs today and in the future.
Use Cases
Observability and Security Insights for Healthcare Organizations
Healthcare organizations using NETSCOUT improve operational resilience, reduce risk, and help improve the success of their digital initiatives.
What Our Customers Are Saying
"NETSCOUT saved so many man hours in troubleshooting. Helping get to root cause of issues much faster. Issues that took days to weeks to solve are now being solved in a fraction of that time."
– User in hospital & healthcare with more than 1,000 employees | Read full review
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What Healthcare clinical applications should be part of proactive observability processes?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into clinical application activity, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, packet loss and much more. This is critically important for healthcare clinical applications that affect patient treatment and care professionals’ productivity, such as Electronic Medical / Health Records (EMR/EHR), Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), telemedicine / telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), e-prescription, and Health Layer 7 (HL7) applications, and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices.
What business IT applications need to be part of a proactive observability strategy in healthcare organizations?
Application performance from a network vantage point provides holistic insights into application utilization, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including the complex infrastructure and communication paths that impact overall performance. Business oriented IT applications like Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), medical billing and coding, practice management, unified communications and collaboration as a service (UCaaS), and healthcare supply chain management software, that are critical in supporting hospital and healthcare operations. These are just some of the over 1,000 applications NETSCOUT supports. By correlating application service activity in real-time with enterprise-wide views, IT teams gain an accurate understanding of application performance and user experience for faster root-cause identification, reduced service restoration times, and lower MTTR.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues in remote medical offices?
NETSCOUT delivers observability anywhere in a healthcare network including distributed medical clinics and offices across a campus and distributed region that benefit from the comprehensive user experience, network and application performance visibility we provide. NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring for synthetic testing and deep packet inspection for IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures which is critical to the latency sensitive healthcare applications and platforms found in remote medical offices, clinics, and hospital departments and wings.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of clinical healthcare applications differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It natively supports over a thousand applications “out of the box,” including critical medical applications like EMR, DICOM, and HL7, as well as provides flexible configuration options to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of healthcare operations?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides healthcare organizations with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical IT and clinical services from all attack types and sizes.
