Improve healthcare service starts with better information management

By Orcun Tezel, Technical Director, 3Com Asia Pacific | Sep 30, 2009

Orcun Tezel

Whether in hospitals, clinics or private practices, healthcare providers perform a delicate balancing act everyday — providing quality healthcare, assuring patient safety and confidentiality, reducing medical errors and complying with a slew of government regulations while simultaneously trying to minimize costs and enhance services.

While that approach seemed reasonable in the past, recent developments have made it unsupportable such as the need for end-to-end visibility to assure compliance with global security and privacy mandates and to streamline business processes. The past few years have also seen a need for speed in deploying new enterprise-wide applications to compete with alternative healthcare providers, a requirement that is severely impeded when systems are disconnected from each other.

Add to this that healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries throughout the world with stringent requirements for end-to-end data security and privacy and it is very clear that CIOs and their IT teams need to grab hold of their networks and manage and secure them as a unified whole.

As a first step to solving this problem, CIOs and their teams have consolidated infrastructure and staffing into data centers, serving up applications, storage and expertise to remote and branch sites from centralized resource pools. However, without centralized management to automate deployment, configuration and oversight of data center and remote operations, consolidation inevitably falls short of its promise.

Below are eight steps to ensure the best outcome for your centralized network management project:

1. Assess your environment. It’s critical that you understand the environment you’re going to be managing and what technologies will be involved, including wired and wireless voice, video and data. Carefully consider your current inventory of resources and think about what will need to be augmented or replaced. Also, examine the expertise of your staff and if you’ll need to add people or send your team to training to get up to speed.

2. Keep the focus on patient care. While there are a wide range of technology solutions for healthcare institutions, make sure you choose the one that will integrate effortlessly with third-party systems and enable medical and technical professionals and providers to focus their efforts and their budgets on patient care rather than learning how to use advanced technologies.

3. Select an integrated, standards-based solution. Convenience and seamlessness are prime considerations when selecting a network management solution. Staff and patients must have flexibility in terms of reciprocity among all health providers and centers within the system. To be effective, a network management solution needs to be connected and easy access to the most widely used medical communications tools today such as Blackberry devices, PDAs and wireless phone systems.