Healthcare

Accessing Critical Applications at All Times

Healthcare organizations require constant connectivity to support the applications and devices needed for each aspect of patient care. Digitally tied together, they are constantly adding new technologies to the network which can increase the likelihood of a disruption.

These bandwidth-intensive applications, such as IoT devices, Electronic Medical Records (EHR) and Picture Archiving Systems (PACS), are critical to healthcare organizations, but place a strain on the network.

Opengear ensures the secure, always-on availability needed to meet strict regulatory requirements, decrease costs and improve patient experiences. Proven to ensure network resilience, Opengear devices address some of the more complex challenges facing healthcare organizations today. Simple to manage, quick to deploy and scalable to thousands of locations, Opengear solutions are compatible with any environment.

To learn more about ensuring maximum uptime for your organization, download our white paper today!

Reducing Downtime During Disruptions

Healthcare systems consist of multiple facilities such as hospitals, labs and urgent care centers. Each having multi-point connectivity requirements, creating a need for higher capacity WAN. If one of these points loses connectivity, without the proper solution in place, the entire network could go down, costing an average of $8600 per hour in revenue.¹

Outages can be causes by a variety if reasons:

• Cyber attacks: One of the top two industries affected by cyberattacks is healthcare with more than 190 million patient records stolen since 2009.²
• Large amounts of IoT devices: As more IoT devices are added, a greater strain is put on the network edge.
• Multiple operating systems: Many healthcare deployments use over 20 different operating systems which can cause interoperability challenges.³

If a disruption occurs, engineers are at a disadvantage without the proper network visibility. Unable to quickly reach distributed sites, costs can quickly accumulate. Opengear solutions ensure network resilience, enterprise-grade security, and always-on connectivity during a disruption.

Read our infographic to learn why Opengear is a critical component to maintaining a healthy IT infrastructure.

Ensuring Compliance and Maintaining Privacy

The healthcare industry has unique compliance and security challenges because of the large amounts of sensitive patient data that is collected. These organizations must meet the wide variety of  Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) standards. Governing health-related transactions and procedures, healthcare organizations must adhere to these requirements to ensure that patient information is protected. Fines of up to $1.5 million can be issued for violations, with that number multiplied by the number of years each violation has been allowed to persist.⁴

The HIPAA security rule requires each healthcare organization to create a contingency plan to ensure that during a disruption, critical business processes are uninterrupted and ensure that electronically protected health information (ePHI) is safeguarded.

Opengear solutions are the foundation of a contingency plan. Lighthouse Enterprise provides full network visibility while Smart Out-of-Band enables engineers to monitor, manage and remediate IT issues at any remote site. Paired with Failover to Cellular which provides always-on availability with 4G LTE, they are able to continue normal business operations while the issue is remediated.

Read our Healthcare Solution Overview Sheet to better understand the importance of maintaining a healthy network.

When every minute counts, you can rely on Opengear

^{1 https://www.aberdeen.com/techpro-essentials/downtime-is-money/
2 https://www.hipaajournal.com/healthcare-data-breach-costs-highest-of-any-industry-at-408-per-record/
3 https://healthitsecurity.com/news/majority-of-medical-devices-are-running-on-legacy-systems
4 https://www.hipaajournal.com/the-cost-of-hipaa-non-compliance-2843/}