With contemporary machines replacing traditional medical practices, keeping all your medical devices in good health is becoming crucial. The ability to record, store, and transfer medical data quickly is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. In addition to speed, network reliability also plays a vital role in determining the quality of a network. Thus, a proper network with a proactive monitoring setup is essential to overcoming the challenges of healthcare infrastructure.
Proper monitoring of your healthcare IT ensures:
A robust network monitoring tool unifies the monitoring experience of all your healthcare devices, servers, and applications, helping your network stay ahead of the curve.
The primary objectives of any IT team in monitoring a healthcare network are ensuring device availability, preserving the data, and securing the data. Network administrators must closely monitor device availability, continuous data transmission, and peak application performance.
Medical records play a vital role in delivering effective treatment. A well-maintained medical record has everything about a patient, including past medical issues, relevant clinical findings, test results, recuperative care, medications, and health advancement. Rather than maintaining paper records, the effective way to manage a patient's medical history is creating a database in your network.
This enables hospitals to quickly begin treatment without wasting time and effort on repetitive tests. However, it is imperative to safeguard patients' electronic protected health information against losses or breaches, such as a breach of confidentiality or privacy. Thus, it is crucial to deploy proper network monitoring software to maintain the network's reliability and the hospital's reputation.
Availability monitoring keeps track of device uptime. This lets you know about devices that are awake and devices that are asleep. Proactive monitoring helps keep critical devices awake during important operations.
Latency is a delay in the response to a request, and prolonged latency results in a lag in an application's performance. This results in loss of reliability.
CPU uses memory to store data, so understanding their utilization is crucial to keeping the network at equilibrium.
Monitoring storage proactively helps you plan the capacity of your organization effectively since a well-maintained medical record database is essential for all healthcare organizations.
A sudden surge in network traffic could indicate a malware attack, so continuous traffic monitoring helps strengthen security.
Keep an eye on your hardware because a fluctuating power supply, altering voltage, and increasing hardware temperature will negatively impact your network's performance.
The healthcare industry has faced numerous challenges and has adopted technology to resolve many medical difficulties. However, integrating with new technologies brings its own set of challenges that push healthcare businesses to adapt in order to provide effective treatment.
Data security is crucial for any domain. However, security breaches and cyber thieving are especially detrimental in healthcare as they affect patients' health privacy. A good network monitoring tool that can fortify security with adaptive thresholds and a proactive alert system helps keep security-related problems at bay.
Policies like HIPAA and HITECH help healthcare organizations protect patients' sensitive health information. A minor compliance breach or unrenewed license could end up costing your business so much. Thus, a proper network monitoring tool that keeps you compliant with all the policies and that alerts you about any breach is critical to running a healthcare business.
Since data storage is a cornerstone of healthcare businesses, poor capacity planning can lead to poor network performance. An overflowing storage system has a high chance of data loss, which is unacceptable. Good capacity planning helps cut down on costs like impromptu device purchases. A network monitoring tool with capacity forecasting helps resolve this challenge by raising timely alerts about low storage.
Globally, the healthcare industry is extremely stringent about maintaining proper medical records. A medical record containing the correct medical history makes it easy for a healthcare clinician to start treatment right away. With healthcare businesses growing across oceans, monitoring tools that can monitor devices in a distributed network setup are in high demand.
Network downtime is disastrous for healthcare businesses because, in addition to costing a lot of money, it can indirectly impact patients' health. It is important to keep the network up and running always.
OpManager is an efficiently integrated network monitoring solution that helps your IT team simplify network monitoring. This self-guided, easy-to-use software allows you to monitor smart medical equipment as well as conventional network devices effortlessly. Any device that is connected to the network through an IP address is monitored by OpManager via internet standard protocols, like SNMP or WMI. Here are some highlights of its many features to help you decide if OpManager is right for your healthcare infrastructure.
It is important for healthcare institutions to comply with policies like HIPAA and HITECH. Policies like these are framed to protect the sensitive health information of patients. They not only aid health insurance portability but also make sure that health information is not accessed without the patient's consent. Integrating ManageEngine Network Configuration Manager with OpManager can help you achieve network compliance with domain-specific policies. With every configuration being backed up, Network Configuration Manager automatically runs a compliance check on the newly configured setup.
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