Health care is a rapidly-evolving and diverse industry, ranging from primary care facilities to medical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology development. But all of these organizations are seeking to make their employees more productive while controlling the costs associated with service and product delivery. By accelerating application performance across the WAN, Riverbed's WDS solutions can simultaneously help healthcare facilities share information faster, consolidate IT infrastructure, and meet the demands of patient data protection.
Primary care facilities
Hospitals and physician groups are increasingly being consolidated into a network of service providers that aim to provide comprehensive coverage for their clients. Connected by a wide-area network, these organizations are seeking to simplify health care by utilizing electronic health records (EHR) to share critical information more easily. At the same time the WAN is an essential tool for utilizing specialized services that may exist at only one location. For example, PACS or DICOM imagery data can be sent to another location and analyzed by a specialist who is not located at the patient site. But these activities are often limited by application performance; in times of emergency applications may actually be a limiting factor in delivering proper, timely care.
These facilities are also under pressure by the government to better protect patient data. In the US, for example, HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requires strict management of patient information. While organizations frequently deploy servers and applications at each location to expedite access, healthcare organizations are rapidly consolidating infrastructure to just one or two locations in order to make HIPAA compliance easier to achieve and audit. This act of consolidation also helps to reduce IT operations costs. Often capital expenditures can be reduced through higher utilization of infrastructure, and IT operations can complete day-to-day maintenance more easily, and focus on strategic projects to better serve the patient.
Pharmaceutical and medical device development
Pharmaceutical and medical device companies invest billions in high-risk product development. They engage in a lengthy process that is highly regulated by organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), requiring careful accounting of the development process and error-free communications among different research, development, and clinical testing teams. GMP (Good Manufacturing Processes) often adds another layer of complex best practices that affect application and network usage themselves.
Distributed environments often make this level of information sharing very difficult. If the company has distributed applications and data, employees often have difficulty retrieving data from other branch offices or even headquarters in a timely fashion. Assuring that users get the "right" version of data is often difficult, as different users may be working on different versions of the same file. In centralized environments, branch offices often suffer from very slow performance and network congestion. In either case, Riverbed's WDS solutions can help by accelerating application performance.
