Adam Young, director of sales engineering EMEA at LogicMonitor, explains how monitoring can help solve the challenges facing the healthcare industry.
While the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruption to industries across the globe, healthcare was arguably hit the hardest. Hospitals and care units had to adapt fast, pivoting to accommodate a huge influx of new COVID cases alongside other non-COVID patients. Parts of the healthcare workforce were forced to work remotely at a moment’s notice, or offer remote services to those in need with only minimal IT support.
The challenges were unprecedented, but organisations moved fast to meet them. Vaccinations were developed and distributed in record time, and purpose-built treatment centres were created to cater for the sheer volume of COVID patients. The development of other nascent technologies like remote triage of patients, IoT and telemedicine was accelerated in order to care for patients outside traditional hospital walls.
This surge in innovation has, however, introduced a few challenges of its own. Each advancement made in the fight against the pandemic has required new technology, new systems and solutions.
Several new layers have been added to health organisations’ tech stacks, creating an increasingly muddied picture of their overall operations. Visibility is critical to keep operations running smoothly, so investing in technologies that can help organisations achieve Full Stack Observability (FSO) will be key moving forward.
Key challenges in healthcare
Making the most of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Use of remote monitoring sensors, or wearables, that track and highlight patterns in patient health data and record results from drug and equipment tests, have grown significantly. According to statistica, the number of wearable devices has more than doubled in the space of just three years from 325 million in 2016 to 722 million in 2019, and is forecast to reach over a billion by 2022.
The increase in wearable devices means an increase in data, and healthcare providers need to be able to keep pace accordingly. To effectively record and analyse the data generated from wearable devices, healthcare organisations will need to leverage technologies such as Big Data and AI.
Striking the balance between in-person and telehealthcare
When the world was told to “stay at home” to curb the spread of the pandemic, the majority of health consultations began to occur remotely. It quickly became apparent, however, that many healthcare organisations weren’t set up for remote consultation, that not all platforms were suitable for such a use, and that certain consultations were simply not possible outside of a specialist healthcare unit.
New and better systems were required to determine which consultations needed to be in-person, which could be done via telehealth, and which required a true hybrid approach. Going forward, reinforcing a seamless and flexible link between virtual and in-person appointments will be essential to ensure follow-ups are carried out and that the right treatment and prescriptions are delivered to patients.
Preparing for the unknown
While opinions differ over what the future of the working world will look like, one thing is clear; it will not return to how it was pre-pandemic. We’ve trialled working from home, the return to work and a hybrid approach, and it’s likely that the latter will be our “new normal”. Each of these approaches comes with its own set of pros and cons for workers, and unique challenges for IT teams.
Healthcare professionals deal with highly confidential patient data on a daily basis, so security is paramount. IT teams need to have a holistic view of everything that is going on across their tech stack, so they can identify threats and potential issues before they occur. When it comes to security, hybrid work introduces a new set of public and private networks into the mix. IT teams need to think ahead and try their best to prepare for possible security scenarios that up until now have remained unknown.
Why visibility is the key to efficiency
Healthcare institutions employ a vast array of technologies to operate on a daily basis, and if one part of that technological ecosystem goes down, it can have a huge knock-on effect. Without full visibility across a tech stack, departments, teams or individual systems can easily fall into silos and begin operating inefficiently and with limited information.
An example of an organisation that eschewed silos and used innovative technology to tackle visibility head on is the health insurance provider Bupa. Bupa relies on a vast network infrastructure to support its operations.
Following a series of acquisitions in 2017, the provider’s IT team recognised the need to streamline its network operations, noting that the large number of different tools across different organisations used for monitoring was not conducive to efficiency and cost saving.
As a result, the organisation deployed a monitoring and observability solution across two main data centres. This allowed the IT team to quickly consolidate its existing monitoring tools, which streamlined its operations, automated time-consuming processes, and improved IT efficiency.
The learning? Just like it did for Bupa, implementing FSO can help those in the healthcare industry gain a holistic view of all of their complex systems. Once providers gain end-to-end visibility across their networks, applications, business systems and infrastructure, IT teams are able to transition from a reactive to proactive posture, pre-empting issues before they occur. Healthcare workers may not have been able to predict the onset of COVID in March 2020, but with the right technologies, IT teams can predict and prevent IT issues.
