Why should hospitals migrate to NetScaler SD-WAN?

Imagine that you’re a parent with a sick child and you just spent a couple of hours in the waiting room. The last thing you want to do is be called back to the exam room and continue waiting for the doctor another twenty minutes.

Perhaps you ask yourself, “What’s taking the doctor so long?” Chances are, electronic medical records (EMRs) are in part, a culprit slowing the doctor’s productivity. While digital record-keeping is inevitably replacing paper records, the new technology can clog up a well-oiled machine if the right technology is not in place.

Did you know the typical physician encounters 93.2 patients every week?

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Network performance and uptime are critical to physician productivity and efficiency.  If a doctor has a slow or spotty connection online, there’s a power outage or it takes a long time to access an application in order to pull up a patient’s EMR – this is frustrating for the doctor and the patient. Last year, each physician lost 48 minutes on EMR-use and 18 percent of those physicians spent more time on administrative tasks than those using only paper.

A greater network demand, whether it’s attributed to more hires or an increased use of video training – slows down application response time. That means, lost productivity for doctors and longer waits for patients.

To that end, healthcare IT departments must support a mobile workforce with an enhanced computing infrastructure to improve the end-user experience and application response time.

The problem: Wide Area Networks (WANs) suffer from congestion, jitter, packet loss and outages. Erratic performance frustrates users, especially for low-latency applications like VoIP calling, video conferencing, video streaming and virtualized applications and desktops. Plus, WAN capacity can be expensive, and difficult to expand and troubleshoot.

The solution: NetScaler SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) products address these problems. Simply put, NetScaler SD-WAN performs traffic monitoring and management to eliminate the effects of the network on application performance. As Citrix puts it, “NetScaler SD-WAN is more than just a new acronym, but rather it is a recent networking concept full of innovation and investment.” NetScaler SD-WAN is the future of enterprise WAN.

NetScaler SD-WAN can:

  • Reduce WAN traffic
  • Route traffic on the fastest available paths between any two points
  • Provide better quality of service (QoS) for high-priority applications
  • Improve network security
  • Simplify administration for remote and branch offices
  • Allow enterprises to leverage low-cost and flexible Internet and 4GE network connections in place of MPLS links
  • Provide visibility into WAN paths to help administrators troubleshoot performance issues

We can all agree that physician offices need “always-on” connectivity to their EMR and other systems in order to keep the practice running smoothly and ensuring a great patient experience. NetScaler SD-WAN provides quality-of-service and dynamic path-selection over multiple, active WAN connections to ensure the staff can quickly and reliably access what they need for patient care without worrying about individual users consuming all of the available bandwidth at that location with non-critical traffic (i.e., YouTube videos do not take precedence over EMR traffic).

In sum, hospitals – and especially smaller clinics – should migrate to a NetScaler SD-WAN system because these products have a successful track record for improving application performance, lowering WAN costs and strengthening business continuity.

If you want to see a NetScaler SD-WAN solution in action, check out this video to watch a live demonstration. To learn more about NetScaler SD-WAN and how the application will help you, contact salesteam@a2u.net.