SD-WAN in healthcare is changing how hospitals, medical offices and clinics care for patients. Here are four ways healthcare organizations are reaping the rewards.
SD-WAN gives organizations the control to prioritize necessary bandwidth for cloud-based applications, voice and the tools they use most. This leads to noticeable cost savings and performance improvements over the public internet as more applications and services move to the cloud.
With that in mind, here are four ways managed SD-WAN solutions benefit healthcare organizations.
Better Uptime
Network downtime is costly and disastrous for organizations in every industry. But for healthcare, downtime diminishes quality of care and makes it difficult to deliver necessary services. Delayed access to medical records and faulty voice connectivity are just a few of the effects.
SD-WAN offers reliable connections and application performance. It does this by providing redundant failover to the best available circuit. A managed SD-WAN solution will also include 24/7 monitoring of all WAN traffic to control load balancing to meet your specific needs. With proactive monitoring of single or multiple connections at all locations, your organization won’t have to worry about network downtime.
Reliable Voice Quality and Performance
The role of telecommunications in healthcare continues to grow. Video conferencing is the backbone of employee and branch collaboration while telehealth is a growing way for patients to connect with physicians remotely. But if you’re going to connect patients, care providers and healthcare professionals, you’ll need a network that delivers reliable voice quality.
SD-WAN creates a resilient network and quality voice performance for hospitals, outpatients and telehealth doctors. It does this by managing the routing of multiple connection types, including MPLS, broadband and wireless. This ensures the best quality for voice and video. Additionally, SD-WAN reduces costs by using Direct Internet Access (DIA) instead of high-cost circuits to achieve the same Quality of Service (QoS) for voice connectivity.
By leveraging multi-path traffic routing and error-correcting technologies, SD-WAN virtually eliminates latency, jitter and dropped data packets. For healthcare, this translates to improved voice quality and application responsiveness.
More Network Bandwidth
As healthcare organizations implement newer and more innovative technology, the demand for network bandwidth continues to grow. For a rapidly growing industry, traditional networking technology such as MPLS are too slow and expensive to scale. SD-WAN helps you get the most out of the bandwidth you have while making it easier to scale when you need it.
It does this through dynamic bandwidth allocation that controls the traffic flow from devices on your network, cloud applications and collaboration tools. Real-time bandwidth is measured, monitored and used to optimize traffic. SD-WAN automatically corrects a struggling traffic connection and routes it to a better one without a session drop.
By optimizing network processes to create more bandwidth, SD-WAN provides direct benefits for healthcare organizations. The extra bandwidth and traffic prioritization speeds access to electronic health records, mHealth applications, telehealth platforms and voice-enabled applications. And it gives organizations the infrastructure to handle artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and intelligent analytics if they so choose.
Simplified Multi-Site Branch Rollout
As healthcare networks add branches, networking connectivity gets more complex. SD-WAN makes it possible to connect each location with high-performance networking that doesn’t require significant capital costs up front.
Plus, because the solution works within your existing network, it’s simple to deploy. This also makes it less costly than traditional WAN architectures.
Conclusion
Networking demands continue to increase across the healthcare spectrum. Managed SD-WAN solutions improve uptime, performance, bandwidth and scalability, making it easier for patients, care providers and healthcare professionals to connect.
