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.

Why does your healthcare IT team need a network monitoring application?

Proper monitoring of your healthcare IT ensures:

Healthcare Monitoring Application - Network Monitoring
  • Continued availability of applications and patient data with minimal downtime.
  • Peak performance of the healthcare devices and their associated applications.
  • Advanced network troubleshooting with proactive fault identification.
  • Powerful network visualization that gives deep visibility into the network.
  • Seamless network functioning at top speed with an enhanced user experience.
  • A secured IT infrastructure by establishing compliance that protects patient confidentiality.
  • A well-established network infrastructure that supports distributed networks.

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.

Primary objectives of IT teams in monitoring a healthcare network

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.

Critical metrics that healthcare IT teams must focus on

 

Availability

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

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 and memory utilization

CPU uses memory to store data, so understanding their utilization is crucial to keeping the network at equilibrium.

 

Storage

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.

 

Network traffic

A sudden surge in network traffic could indicate a malware attack, so continuous traffic monitoring helps strengthen security.

 

Hardware health

Keep an eye on your hardware because a fluctuating power supply, altering voltage, and increasing hardware temperature will negatively impact your network's performance.

Challenges healthcare businesses face while monitoring their IT

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.

Here are the top challenges of monitoring healthcare IT:
 

Increasing patients' privacy

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.

 

Adhering to compliance regulations

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.

 

Capacity planning

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.

 

Managing distributed networks

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.

 

Maintaining high availability

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.

Here is why your IT team needs OpManager

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.

  • Instantly discover all your network devices and find them listed in the inventory section. Robust discovery options, like scheduled discovery and discovery rules, make the process absolutely seamless.
  • Proactively monitor all devices, like routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, VMs, printers, storage devices, and other smart devices specifically designed for your healthcare environment. The advanced monitoring capabilities help you monitor your network beyond the basic metrics, like memory and utilization. OpManager helps you assign specific process monitors to ease multi-metric monitoring. These preconfigured network monitors start monitoring your devices right away.
  • OpManager, with its adaptive thresholds feature, helps you set multi-level thresholds. Being highly resilient, OpManager quickly notifies network administrators of any threshold breaches using color-coded alerts. Its multi-channel notification system makes sure network admins do not miss any alerts.
  • OpManager's smart visualization options, like network maps, Layer 2 maps, category-based device maps, and list views, help you understand your network infrastructure at just a glance.
  • OpManager's Reports tab offers over 100 built-in reports to transform messy numbers into useful data, helping you quickly take the relevant courses of action to improve your network.
  • Get a summary of your network by viewing OpManager's high-impact dashboards. Use the default dashboard or create your own with over 200 performance widgets to show only what you really need.
  • OpManager comes pre-populated with over 11,000 device templates, and its multi-vendor support allows you to add devices in bulk to the network.
  • Above all, its transparent pricing; affordability; and easy-to-install, easy-to-use module make OpManager the top choice for over one million network administrators.

How does OpManager help your network stay compliant?

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.

Monitor your healthcare organization's bandwidth with ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer to analyze traffic patterns, understand network storage, locate bandwidth-related bottlenecks, and do much more. Read more

Monitor your network's firewall logs with ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer to analyze the security device logs, improve firewall performance, and generate data-rich forensic reports. Read more

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Customer reviews

OpManager

OpManager - 10 Steps Ahead Of The Competition, One Step Away From Being Unequalled.

- Network Services Manager, Government Organization

Review Role: Infrastructure and Operations Company Size: Gov't/PS/ED 5,000 - 50,000 Employees

"I have a long-standing relationship with ManageEngine. OpManager has always missed one or two features that would make it truly the best tool on the market, but over it is the most comprehensive and easy to use the product on the market."

OpManager

Easy Implementation, Excellent Support & Lower Cost Tool

- Team Lead, IT Service Industry

Review Role: Infrastructure and Operations Company Size: 500M - 1B USD

"We have been using OpManager since 2011 and our overall experience has been excellent. The tool plays a vital role in providing the value to our organisation and to the customers we are supporting. The support is excellent and staff takes full responsibilities in resolving the issues. Innovation is never stopping and clearly visible with newer versions"

OpManager

Easy Implementation With A Feature Rich Catalogue, Support Has Some Room For Improvement

- NOC Manager in IT Service Industry

Review Role: Program and Portfolio Management Company Size: 500M - 1B USD

"The vendor has been supporting during the implementation & POC phases providing trial licenses. Feature requests and feedback is usually acted upon swiftly. There was sufficient vendor support during the implementation phase. After deployment, the support is more than adequate, where the vendor could make some improvements."

OpManager

Great Monitoring Tool

- CIO in Finance Industry

Review Role: CIO Company Size: 1B - 3BUSD

"Manage Engine provides a suite of tools that have made improvements to the availability of our internal applications. From monitoring, management and alerting, we have been able to peak performance within our data center."

OpManager

Simple Implementation, Easy To Use. Very Intuitive.

- Principal Engineer in IT Services

Review Role: Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation Company Size: 250M - 500M USD

"Manage Engine support was helpful and responsive to all our queries"

 
 
 

Case Studies - OpManager

OpManager
Thorp Reed & Armstrong

Industry: Government

Randy S. Hollaway from Thorp Reed & Armstrong relies on OpManager for prompt alerts and reports.

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Hinduja Global Solutions saves $3million a year using OpManager

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Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) is an Indian business process management (BPM) organization headquartered in Bangalore and part of the Hinduja Group. HGS combines technology-powered automation, analytics, and digital services focusing on back office process.

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OpManager
USA-Based Healthcare Organization Monitor's Network Devices Using OpManager and Network Configuration Manager

Industry: Healthcare

One of the largest radiology groups in the nation, with a team of more than 200 board-certified radiologists, provides more than 50 hospital and specialty clinic partners with on-site radiology coverage and interpretations.

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Netherlands-based real estate data company avoids system downtime using OpManager and Firewall Analyzer

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Global news and media company

Industry: Telecommunication and Media

Bonita uses OpManager to monitor their network infrastructure and clear bottlenecks.

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