How Real-Time Monitoring Can Transform Healthcare IT Operations

The Critical Nature of Healthcare IT

Healthcare organizations rely on real-time data to make life-saving decisions every day. The responsibility of ensuring that the right information reaches the right healthcare professionals at the right time falls squarely on healthcare IT departments. This means that application performance and availability aren’t just IT metrics – they’re critical components of patient care.

We’re not just talking about electronic medical records (EMRs). Modern healthcare delivery depends on entire infrastructures that include radiology systems, back-office accounting, patient monitoring services, and much more. Data availability at all times isn’t merely a regulatory checkbox; it’s essential to delivering quality care.

The Challenge: When Healthcare and IT Collide

Today’s healthcare organizations are under tremendous strain trying to balance top-tier patient care with increased costs, insurance requirements, and governmental regulations. Most organizations have tackled these challenges by implementing wide-ranging technology systems designed to improve access to information, such as digital imaging, electronic medical and patient records, and integration of back-office systems with insurance providers. This forward-thinking approach has improved some areas but has created unique challenges elsewhere:

• Stringent Data Requirements: Healthcare organizations face strict data duplication, replication, and retention requirements. Fault tolerance is non-negotiable.
• Demanding SLAs: In many organizations, a 30-minute SLA on production-impacting issue resolution may be implemented with little effort in tracking adherence to those SLAs.
• Complex Management Structure: In some cases, the complexity of the systems in use requires the services of application vendors to manage them, which can lead to coordination issues. In other environments, the IT function may have been outsourced entirely, which can also result in fragmented observability and resource management.
• Routine Storage Overprovisioning: To avoid potential over-utilization issues, many organizations routinely overprovision storage to provide buffers against usage constraints. Combined with strict requirements from application vendors, storage provisioning is often inefficient and under-utilized.
• Insufficient Monitoring Tools: Existing device-specific tools cannot cohesively alert on and troubleshoot issues across multiple Storage platforms and interconnects necessary for maintaining redundancy and availability.

Any critical incident that impacts the availability of patient records can serve as a wake-up call that organizations need a comprehensive real-time monitoring solution.

The Solution: End-to-End Infrastructure Observability

After evaluating their options, healthcare organizations can implement Virtana’s Infrastructure Observability platform across their production environments in multiple data centers. What sets this solution apart is its ability to provide true end-to-end visibility across the entire infrastructure stack:

Comprehensive Monitoring Coverage

Unlike vendor-specific tools that only monitor isolated components, Virtana’s solution provides unified visibility across:

• Storage Layer: Detailed performance metrics from a wide range of storage arrays, capturing latency, throughput, capacity, and utilization patterns. Application latency can be an absolute show-stopper in mission critical environments, and storage latency identification and remediation is a must-have.
• Conversation-Level Detail: Provides the ability to monitor storage conversations in near real-time, which provides immediate and complete insight into infrastructure performance
• Network Fabric: Real-time visibility into the storage fabrics, identifying congestion points and routing inefficiencies
• Server Infrastructure: Performance monitoring of standalone and virtualized servers, tracking CPU, memory, and I/O metrics and how they relate to infrastructure performance
• Application Integration: Application-aware monitoring that understands the specific requirements of mission-critical systems like EPIC, Pharmacy Inventory Systems, and other EMR systems

Unified Analytics Platform

The Virtana Infrastructure Observability platform consolidates this wealth of data into actionable insights:

• Single Source of Truth: Eliminates disputes between vendor and internal teams by providing objective, comprehensive data
• Advanced Analytics Engine: Applies machine learning to identify patterns and predict potential issues before they impact systems
• Custom Dashboards: Provides role-specific views for different stakeholders, from technical teams to executive leadership
• Automated Health Checks: Continuously verifies that infrastructure components are operating within defined parameters

This level of visibility can be revolutionary for the healthcare industry. For the first time, organizations can see across traditionally siloed domains and understand how actions in one area of the infrastructure affect others. The platform provides the context needed to make informed decisions about resource allocation, performance optimization, and capacity planning.

The Results: From Reactive to Proactive IT Management

With comprehensive monitoring in place, healthcare organizations can expect transformative benefits:

• Drastic Reduction in Resolution Time: Cross-platform problems that traditionally take days to remediate can be identified and resolved in minutes.
• Optimized Architecture: Understanding system workloads better allows for re-architecting storage provisioning to isolate workloads that might create contention.
• Unified Monitoring Platform: The Virtana Infrastructure Observability platform can combine previously disparate platform management teams under multiple vendors, establishing a common monitoring and alerting platform.
• Significantly Improved Reliability: Proactive alerting to vendor teams, combined with monthly health/utilization/performance reports and scorecard tracking, can significantly reduce availability-impacting events.
• Enhanced Root Cause Analysis: The platform can quickly and effectively provide infrastructure-wide metric correlation that would otherwise require multiple tools and people to compile.

Business Impact: Better Patient Care Through Better Technology

Implementation can deliver substantial value across organizations:

• Protected Clinical Workflows: Proactive identification and addressing of infrastructure problems before they affect clinical practices
• Elimination of Unplanned Outages: Reduced risk of performance slow-downs when virtualizing healthcare systems
• Improved Application Performance: Faster, more reliable access to medical records
• Regulatory Compliance: Maintained and proven SLA compliance for Joint Commission audits and HIPAA regulations
• Optimized Resource Utilization: Better NAS, SAN, server, and storage port utilization can avoid unnecessary purchases, potentially diverting up to 50% of cost savings to fund strategic healthcare initiatives
• Reduced Support Burden: Trouble tickets can decrease by up to 80%, allowing more resources to be directed toward patient care initiatives

Conclusion: IT Excellence Enabling Healthcare Excellence

For healthcare organizations, IT infrastructure isn’t just a back-office concern—it’s a critical component of patient care. Partnering with Virtana can provide a comprehensive monitoring solution that transforms IT operations from a potential liability into a strategic asset. Real-world examples of benefits from deployed customers include:

• 99.999% Uptime – Proactive avoidance of outages by catching issues before they escalate into outages. Source: West coast-based healthcare provider
• 70% Fewer Alerts – By filtering and correlating events, teams receive 50-70% fewer alerts, allowing them to focus on critical incidents. Source: EU-based hospital.
• 75% Faster Report Generation. Automatic report generation provides significant reductions in the time spent piecing together data, from capacity forecasting to storage health, for actionable insights. Source: US-based healthcare system

By moving from reactive to proactive management, ensuring system uptime, and optimizing resource allocation, healthcare IT teams can help their organizations deliver on their most important promise: providing excellent patient care when it matters most.