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Challenges
- Existing monitoring tools were not scalable and struggled to support critical patient-care applications
- The network infrastructure was growing in complexity as healthcare services expanded
- Remote clinicians needed instantaneous and uninterrupted access to vital diagnostic images and patient data
Outcomes
- Improved incident response times
The university medical center has significantly reduced the time it takes to respond to and resolve incidents, allowing the IT team to detect issues before they escalate into major disruptions. - Proactive system health management
The IT team has improved its proactive system stability management, providing uninterrupted access to necessary applications for patient care by clinicians. - Streamlined IT operations and enhanced patient care
The university medical center has automated the monitoring of a significant portion of its application portfolio, powering optimal performance of healthcare applications for clinicians.
A Pioneer in Medical Research, Education, and Patient Care
A university medical center is on a mission to personalize the patient experience through a caring spirit and distinctive capabilities.
Challenge
University medical centers are known for exceptional patient care and cutting-edge medical technology, attracting clinicians and patients from all over the world. In 2019, the IT team at this leading medical center faced a significant challenge. They needed to upgrade their network and application performance monitoring to keep up with the increasing scope of their healthcare services and the growing complexity of their network infrastructure.
The traditional monitoring tool at the medical center was not scalable enough to support its growing needs, particularly with critical patient-care applications used in areas like radiology. Healthcare technology is rapidly evolving and becoming more distributed and interconnected. And the medical center’s network, which consisted of in-house systems, cloud-based services, and data centers, needed a robust solution to help ensure uninterrupted connectivity and optimal network performance.
The pressure was particularly high in situations where any delay could impact care, such as when remote clinicians need access to patient X-rays and other diagnostic images. Timely patient care isn’t just a preference; it’s a necessity that the medical center cannot afford to compromise.
Solution
The medical center’s objective was to understand all the factors that impact application availability and performance so they could optimize the experience for clinicians, clinics, and hospitals. Achieving this goal required seeing across the Internet, so they could quickly identify issues related to DNS or critical cloud services. They found a solution in ThousandEyes, which offers a comprehensive view of the entire digital delivery chain.
ThousandEyes has empowered the medical center to detect and analyze issues swiftly, serving as an early warning system for identifying broader, systemic problems. According to a system manager at the university medical center, “ThousandEyes is like a canary in a coal mine, indicating larger issues. We use it during major incidents and significant downtimes to determine if the issue is more widespread than just a few specific applications.”
The university medical center’s team has enhanced their visibility with ThousandEyes, enabling them to identify issues such as latency experienced by remote radiologists when accessing X-rays. ThousandEyes has also shifted the medical center’s monitoring approach from isolated to integrated, providing them with an executive dashboard that immediately displays network latency or DNS health issues. This centralized visibility is a marked improvement over the previous situation, where service health was assessed by consulting multiple teams, often during crisis calls.
With ThousandEyes, the university medical center’s IT team has comprehensive data that accelerates problem resolution. The platform’s detailed insights allow them to determine whether an issue is confined to a single application or indicative of broader network or external problems. “We have agents in both data centers, which allows us to determine the root of a problem,” explained the medical center’s system manager. “If one data center experiences an issue but the agent in the other center can still access the application, then we know the issue isn’t with the application itself.”
The medical center also integrated ThousandEyes alerts into Splunk through a simple API and utilized IT Service Intelligence to automate the process. This integration allows them to monitor more than 100 core applications, which account for 60% of their application portfolio, and set thresholds in Splunk to determine when an issue requires attention.
The insights provided by ThousandEyes have been crucial in ensuring that the university medical center’s healthcare applications perform optimally, reflecting the organization’s unwavering commitment to delivering immediate and high-quality patient care.
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