The right support model enables healthcare providers to tackle some of their most pressing challenges

Healthcare is undergoing a revolutionary change. In the same way that antibiotics and medical imaging changed the way that healthcare is provided, so accelerated adoption of technology as an enabler of advanced healthcare is set to change the game.

The continued expansion of high-speed, software-defined networks and connected devices is enabling healthcare providers across the world to reimagine what world-class healthcare looks like. Using smart devices, from the simple heart rate monitor to smartwatches and connected insulin pumps, it’s now possible for caregivers to monitor patients remotely, enabling them to recover at home where they would have had to remain hospitalized in the past.

Enabling this requires taking advantage of a complex ecosystem of tools and solutions all working in concert to ensure that data is seamlessly and securely routed from the patient to systems leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. These systems ensure that caregivers are promptly alerted to any events that would require intervention.

Underpinning these capabilities is the next generation of software-defined infrastructure, enabling agile and flexible services, with the patient at the center. 

The challenges – what the research shows 

Making sense of an increasingly complex environment

While the services required by future connected healthcare solutions are driven by software-defined infrastructure, internal teams often don’t have the capabilities to properly support this expanding estate.

Healthcare is an extremely complex environment with onerous governance and compliance requirements established to protect patients’ personal data. IT teams inside healthcare environments are finding themselves torn between the need to leverage technology to meet changing patient needs while still closely monitoring the day-to-day performance of the underlying infrastructure.

This means that even though they have the required tools, they still don’t have the visibility and control they need to ensure optimized service levels and efficiency across the extended environment.

At the same time, they’re being asked to guide their colleagues on the best technologies to advance their medical strategy, finding ways to integrate new technology without disrupting the workflows of medical personnel.

Making life or death choices

While visibility is a challenge for all organizations, the healthcare sector creates an especially difficult environment as any kind of security breach or system failure could have fatal consequences.

Leveraging the data analytics capabilities of software-defined infrastructure is critical to the ability of organizations in this sector to make informed decisions about how they evolve their infrastructure strategy. Where the growth in usage is, what parts of the ecosystem are delivering the greatest value and identify potential vulnerabilities to ensure that no patient information is compromised.

Managing IT sprawl

In the past, organizations – both in the healthcare sector and beyond – have found that they’ve fallen foul of spiraling costs from untracked software assets and uncontrolled cloud spend. These are typically the result of the IT organizations looking to have the infrastructure in place to meet changes in demand but not having the skills and resources to optimize the management of their legacy hardware and software assets to ensure return on investment and consistent lifecycle management.

With this area out of control, the security and downtime risk can expose healthcare providers to critical service affecting incidents. 

Right care, right place for BovenIJ Hospital

With a clear vision of providing connected care, BovenIJ Hospital in the Netherlands needed to ensure that they had the ability to seamlessly manage their infrastructure.

Providing the right care in the right place is central to their approach of providing affordable, high-quality care and the move towards connected-care programs, enabled by technology. Wherever possible, care is relocated to the home – a practice that’s convenient for patients and alleviates pressure on hospital resources.

Secure patient-caregiver connections

Understanding that this would play an increasingly important part in how they serviced their community, they needed to ensure that all connections between patients, the hospital and caregivers were secure. Partnering with us, they implemented a Palo Alto firewall that initially secured their internal network and data center but could be extended to cover additional locations.

While their internal team set the policies needed to comply with their security guidelines, we’re leveraging a highly automated management platform with a single view service portal that provides all stakeholders with near real-time insights into activity on the firewall. This ensures that mundane tasks such as log inspections are now completely automated with the relevant teams notified should anything be out of order.

Active, consistent management

These results have allowed them to free up resources and enhance overall performance while we support simplified active and consistent management processes, enabling them to navigate known and unknown threats to their devices.

As they focus on delivering the high-quality healthcare, the ability of software-defined infrastructure services to reduce operational complexity and keep critical IT systems off life support will be 

Bovenij logo

Success factors

Icon indicating Threat hunting with evidence data

Monitoring

Proactive monitoring of devices

icon indicating Managed Collaboration and Communication Services

Data analysis

Automated analysis of key data 

Skills

Access to global skills when needed

See the connection – NTT DATA and BovenIJ Hospital

BovenIJ’s connected-care program links in-hospital and outpatient care

Together with BovenIJ Hospital, we introduced new, connected-care programs that aim to extend further care to more people with a greater focus on data privacy, protection and security. 

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