Strategies for Developing Autonomous and Safeguarded IT Infrastructures within Healthcare Institutions

Strategies for Developing Autonomous and Safeguarded IT Infrastructures within Healthcare Institutions

In the world of healthcare, keeping operational and clinical workflows visible is paramount to avoid downtime and secure the network against threats. The stakes are high, as a single outage could lead to significant financial losses and potential damage to patient care.

Health systems are faced with managing numerous applications across various environments such as network, servers, storage, and cloud. Enter observability tools. These innovative solutions, like IBM Instana and Splunk Observability Cloud, provide the crucial visibility that healthcare organizations need.

Patrick Lin, senior vice president and general manager of observability at Splunk, explains, "Observability tools offer unified visibility into the convergence of operational and clinical workflows, helping healthcare organizations optimize care delivery by collecting data insights into system behavior."

Solving Five Key Challenges

Observability tools are a lifesaver for healthcare organizations, addressing five significant challenges:

1. Critical Application Protection: A self-aware network can ensure the uptime of essential applications like patient monitoring equipment, potentially protecting a patient's life if a system goes down.
2. Understanding System Interconnectivity: These tools can grasp the interconnectivity of systems and network endpoints, monitoring transactions and API calls. Just as healthcare providers monitor a patient's vital signs, IT leaders need to stay on top of their network's health.
3. Identifying Vulnerabilities: Knowing where vulnerabilities lie and being able to quarantine them or take action promptly is essential to maintaining secure healthcare applications.
4. Managing Segmented Support Systems: Segregated support systems in healthcare often lead to inefficiencies. Centralizing governance with common tools and a unified language can prevent this.
5. Keeping Partner and Vendor Accountability: Healthcare organizations can use code-level insights, combined with application and hardware logs, network path tracing, and proactive monitoring, to ensure third-party vendors adhere to service-level agreements (SLAs).

Facing Observability Challenges

Healthcare organizations may encounter obstacles in implementing observability, as it's often fragmented and vendor-owned. This leads to a lack of visibility, forcing healthcare systems to rely on their vendors to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs). Segmented support systems can result in a cascade of inefficiency, according to Lin.

He advises healthcare organizations to stay accountable to their partners and vendors by utilizing code-level insights, combining these with application and hardware logs, and employing proactive monitoring that covers both private and public networks.

AIOps to the Rescue

Alert fatigue is a significant hurdle in maintaining a self-aware network, particularly for healthcare providers faced with countless alerts. AIOps, or artificial intelligence for IT operations, comes to the rescue by allowing healthcare organizations to prioritize important alerts.

By embedding AI within observability tools, healthcare organizations can minimize false positives and establish dynamic baselines using historic data. This allows them to group alerts into events and maintain visibility, facilitating efficient monitoring and prompt response to issues.

AI agents, such as log agents and metric agents, can also help correlate information on network issues, while ML technologies and large language models can sift through data to locate problems in log files and diagnose them without human intervention.

In summary, observability tools are essential for modern healthcare organizations. By overcoming challenges like alert fatigue, vendors, and partners accountability, and data management and integration, these tools can help healthcare providers create self-aware, efficient, and secure IT networks, improving patient care and reducing the risk of downtime.

1. To improve patient care and reduce the risk of downtime, healthcare organizations are increasingly embracing advanced technologies such as cybersecurity, data-and-cloud-computing, and technology.
2. A critical challenge for healthcare organizations, as highlighted by Patrick Lin, is managing and maintaining the security of key applications like patient monitoring equipment, which can be facilitated through cybersecurity solutions and technologies.
3. In striving for efficient and secure IT networks, healthcare organizations can leverage AI and machine learning (AI and ML) in their observability tools. These technologies can help minimize false positives, establish dynamic baselines using historic data, and diagnose issues without human intervention ( AIOPs or artificial intelligence for IT operations).

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