A Look at Network Bandwidth in Healthcare: Connectivity Needs and Solutions

network bandwidth in healthcare

Today’s healthcare providers leverage more technology than they ever have in the past, particularly as more institutions migrate patient data and files to the cloud. As such, proper network bandwidth support and the ability to constantly have access to this information is paramount in today’s medical industry.

 

Healthcare technologies

Ecessa noted in a recent blog post that an estimated two-thirds of all healthcare firms now utilize cloud-based electronic health record applications. However, this is by no means the only technology these institutions have in place.

 

According to an Ecessa infographic, two-thirds of providers also leverage health information exchange, contributing to the more than 150 exabytes of data created daily by the healthcare industry. This represents 30 percent of the world’s total data.

 

Furthermore, mobility has become an increasingly important requirement, not only for healthcare practitioners, but for consumers as well. The infographic shows that three-fourths of clinicians plan to disperse their work across their desktop computers, smartphones and tablets by the second quarter of 2015. This makes constant network accessibility critical for institutions, particularly as more employees seek to leverage their mobile devices for healthcare purposes.

 

Unpredictable outages

Under current usage levels, a practice with more than five physicians must have a minimum of 25 Mbps in order to support the online activities of these staff members. As practitioners increasingly rely on mobile devices and cloud-based systems, this connectivity threshold will only rise in the near future.

 

However, in today’s carrier environment, the infographic shows that even connectivity providers with uptime guarantees can experience downtimes. A typical carrier may offer a 99 percent uptime guarantee, which can equate to as much as nine hours of unplanned downtime each year. In a healthcare institution, this is unacceptable. Doctors, nurses and other staff members must be able to access health records and information stored in the cloud at any time in order to provide the best service to their patients.

 

As a result of these conditions, healthcare institutions need additional solutions that can help them guarantee that their network is always up. Ecessa can help create a healthy network design with multiple WAN connections to help ensure that even if one line is down, another is ready and waiting to handle network traffic. This approach not only increases network capacity, but helps to balance workloads and maintain constant network uptime.

 

In today’s healthcare industry, institutions cannot afford to experience downtime. With Ecessa solutions in place, they can be confident that their online resources will never be out of reach.

 

To find out more about Never Down™ Internet, Cloud and wide area network performance, give us a call at 800.669.6242 or contact us with questions.