SD-WAN is a Technology Imperative for a New Era of Digital Healthcare

What is Digital Healthcare?

Digital transformation for clinical labs, medical practices, hospitals, and care centers has resulted in the term Digital Healthcare. Examples of new and expanding patient services include mobile health ‘mHealth’ and Telemedicine. 

The rapid evolution of IT and networks towards virtualized and automated services is driving major change in Healthcare. SD-WAN has a major part to play in underpinning digital healthcare evolution. It is quickly become an essential pillar for supporting healthcare IoT, population health, new AI-supported health applications, patient data analytics, and clinical workflows.

• Growth in bandwidth consumption by medical facilities (or remotely located hospital staff supporting activities via video) places pressure on legacy WAN.
• In order to support and embrace the new world of bandwidth-hungry, and data storage intensive tools, for example Electronic Medical Records (EMR) radiology/MRI imaging, and Telehealth, agile management and cost-effective usage bandwidth are critical aspects.
• Interoperability between legacy infrastructure and a new SD-WAN overlay is an important factor to get right during a digital transformation of legacy networks and existing IT platforms.

Service Provider Takeaways

• Managed SD-WAN service providers need to understand the key drivers and challenges facing the medical industry and be able to provide guidance to customers on how to transition to digital healthcare.
• Customer case studies need to be made available that demonstrate how managed SD-WAN adoption helps with the migration to Digital Healthcare. Examples include:
  • Telehealth – better performance of the network and less downtime
  • Remote-location specialist training and consultation over mission critical video
  • Sharing of medical imaging: MRI, Radiology, etc.
  • Rapid integration of newly acquired sites
  • Secure and compliant connectivity and deployment of apps in the cloud
• Discuss how immersive technologies provide benefits such as use, scalability, and new types experiences your organization, patients and employees.
• Co-innovation projects with medical facilities may offer opportunities to cross-sell SD-WAN services. For example, looking at how immersive technologies demand low-latency and ultra-strong security and how prioritizing network traffic allocation and compliant deployment of virtual firewalls may provide good solutions to support such advancements. 

The full length report is published within the Clavem Research subscriber area. The full report offers more in-depth analysis and opinion on the main considerations that face medical organizations and why SD-WAN provides a good fit. The report also provides case studies based on real implementations including AT&T's project with Rush University Medical, Nokia-Nuage and UPMC, and VMware-VeloCloud's deployment with Saber Healthcare. 
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