Case Studies: Successful SD-WAN Deployments in Healthcare
For the healthcare industry, it is essential that the network infrastructure is continuously reliable and secure, due to being critical to improving the quality of patient care and providing uninterrupted operations. One way to achieve this is for healthcare organisations to leverage Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) solutions.
In this article we look into case studies from the healthcare industry across North America, exploring how SD-WAN was deployed to address challenges and their outcomes.
North American Case Studies
In North America, healthcare providers must adhere to healthcare regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patient information.
Wright & Filippis
A leading provider of prosthetics, orthotics and accessibility solutions, Wright and Filippis have over 76 years of experience dedicated to improving patients’ lives by supporting them to regain their mobility and independence. Unfortunately for Wright and Filippis, their longstanding network infrastructure for 32 clinics had begun to experience slow internet speeds and poor electronic medical record (EMR) application performance, which were critical for day-to-day operations. Whilst their legacy infrastructure was experiencing these issues, their end-of-life voice system had also become rather difficult to manage, leading to a decline in patient experiences.
To address these issues, Wright & Filippis deployed a Citrix SD-WAN solution, which not only improved their network reliability but virtually eliminated outages, providing faster internet speeds and application performance, especially for critical EMR systems.
The branch and remote connectivity options provided by Citrix SD-WAN simplified network management and troubleshooting across the 32 clinics, reducing costs compared to their old traditional WAN infrastructure and made sure that call experiences for patients could utilise more reliable voice services.
With an improved network architecture in place, Wright & Filippis were able to overcome the issues experienced with their legacy system and focus on their primary goal of providing life-changing prosthetic, orthotic and accessibility solutions to help patients regain mobility and independence.
Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH)
Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) is the largest provider of healthcare in South-Eastern Kentucky and operates a network of over 100 hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and home health operations. With more than 400,000 lives depending on their services, ARH were concerned with meeting the network demands of continuous patient care across all of these locations and minimising potential downtime.
This is primarily due to ARH experiencing frequent network outages, which caused disrupted operations and patient care, whilst insufficient bandwidth meant that the network could not support their new Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system. It was also noted that, due to the volume of locations and dependent lives with a vast array of different network systems, network administration and management had become a complex job.
These issues hindered ARH's ability to deliver optimal care to their patients and so, to address these challenges, ARH deployed VMware Velocloud SD-WAN, providing with them with high network availability, failover functionality and improved bandwidth.
The Velocloud SD-WAN service enabled proactive monitoring and optimisation of the network for ensuring the network performance did not deteriorate, dual access active/active connectivity at each location for redundancy and failover mechanisms, alongside high-bandwidth ethernet to mitigate the issues with inadequate bandwidth.
ARH, with the assistance of SD-WAN, has achieved virtually zero network downtime, ensuring uninterrupted patient care, improved application performance such as faster access to EMR records and gained real-time visibility into bandwidth allocation and utilisation across their larger bandwidth capacity ethernet connections.
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Finally, MD Anderson Cancer Center is a world-renowned cancer treatment and research institution, which is both a degree-granting academic centre and a comprehensive cancer treatment facility. With faculty and staff spread across more than 25 buildings across Texas, MD Anderson is one of the largest cancer centres globally.
Due to their legacy network infrastructure, MD Anderson has experienced poor application performance, especially for bandwidth-intensive radiology imaging files, slow and inflexible provisioning of new sites and services, inadequate security measures for protecting sensitive patient data and an inability to support remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These issues hindered MD Anderson's ability to deliver quality care to its patients and operate with optimal efficiency and so to address these challenges, MD Anderson partnered with VMware to implement their SD-WAN solution across more than 200 remote offices.
VMware SD-WAN provided MD Anderson with application-aware traffic steering and per-application QoS for improved application performance and prioritisation of crucial services such as radiology imaging files. This meant that MD Anderson could perform an increased number of radiology scans per day, enhancing diagnostic efficiency and decreasing time-to-billing for radiology services.
The centralised management pane and scalability offered by VMware SD-WAN enabled rapid deployment of secure remote connectivity for employees during the pandemic, whilst network administrators could monitor network resiliency and security from this platform.
With VMware SD-WAN, MD Anderson gained the network performance, agility, and security needed to deliver exceptional patient care and advance its cancer research initiatives.
Harry holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of East Anglia and serves as a Cybersecurity Writer here at Netify, where he specialises in enterprise networking technologies. With expertise in Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures, Harry provides in-depth analysis of leading vendors and network solutions.
Fact-checked by: Robert Sturt - Managing Director, Netify
Harry Yelland
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