Networks for real-time healthcare

Challenge: Real-time digital practices call for a cloud-capable network infrastructure

Healthcare systems are complex ecosystems that include hundreds of clinical and business processes executed across many locations. Expanding points of care, digital practices and big data call for a new business and IT model that allows the healthcare system to operate in real time and support a more connected, aware and patient-centric approach to care.

To provide the IT infrastructure required for a real-time healthcare system, you need a network that delivers improved:

• Scalability: Virtual care solutions enabled by cloud-based patient portals, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices and big data are creating new demands for network scalability and capacity.
• Reliability: Doctors need the ability to retrieve electronic health records (EHRs) or digital images on demand to gain a 360-degree view of a patient’s health. Networks must minimize downtime and support backup and disaster recovery capabilities to provide the level of continuity required by a real-time care environment.
• Quality of service: Medical applications, services and data must be prioritized. At any given moment, the network must differentiate between what is important and what is not and match quality of service to each traffic type or application.
• Security: Concerns about security are putting new pressure on network infrastructure and those that manage it. Key areas of concern include meeting strict regulatory requirements for patient data privacy and confidentiality, new devices connecting to the healthcare network, patients and visitors accessing the wireless network, and IoMT devices that monitor patients and other medical equipment.

Solution: A private network to support a private–hybrid healthcare cloud

Real-time healthcare requires an aware and adaptive technology infrastructure that senses, directs and changes as needed. To support the transformation to a real-time care model, you need to embrace innovative cloud and networking technologies. Nokia helps you create a foundation for your real-time healthcare system by:

• Connecting your private cloud infrastructure to ensure compliance with regulatory and organizational guidelines
• Leveraging your existing infrastructure investments
• Consolidating and transforming your data centers
• Supporting applications that are critical to patient care and safety

Our private WAN approach starts with a high-performance backbone that brings optical networking and IP/MPLS connectivity to hospitals, care facilities and data centers. The backbone combines scalability, reliability, quality of service and security with intelligence that supports the requirements of multiple real-time services and applications.

You can further advance your network and cloud infrastructure by using innovative solutions such as software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) to introduce optimization and automation capabilities.

Learn how we can help you can help you implement a more agile, flexible and cost-efficient networking solution to support real-time healthcare and the cloud.

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We can help you create a private WAN that enables the delivery of highly connected, digitally enhanced, patient-driven care. With a private WAN, you can support:

• Flexible and reliable bandwidth for increasing volumes of medical data
• Agile and dynamic provisioning to deliver services where and when needed
• Flexible SLAs to meet real-time healthcare system service and application metrics
• Multi-layer security to protect the confidentiality of patient data and EHRs
• Traffic engineering to ensure resiliency for specific medical applications
• Advanced network services to enable the convergence of legacy and new services
• Application-aware networking to prioritize different medical applications
• Real-time analytics and reporting to understand how the real-time healthcare system is performing

Our solutions provide the IT building blocks you need to support real-time care delivery. They let you move to a network-connected private–hybrid cloud infrastructure that speeds processes, balances resources and demand, and eliminates waste.