More than a path to digitization or a mere advancement in monitoring, Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions are a strategic asset that empower patient care and clinical outcomes via secure, performant, always-available digital experiences. The healthcare ecosystem faces an entirely new environment than it did even just a few short years ago. Healthcare organizations are under enormous pressure to integrate the latest technologies into their business models and IT architectures. This is disrupting service-delivery processes, patient interactions, and administrative operations, and has set digital experience expectations skyrocketing.
Enhanced patient satisfaction and engagement were the top digital transformation priorities for 92% of health systems in a recent Deloitte-Scottsdale Institute survey. Simultaneously, these organizations are grappling with evolving regulatory and risk concerns, as well as significant staffing strains. Supporting this transformation is a vast ecosystem of mobile medical, m-health, and point-of-care (POC) applications for accessing, managing, and storing electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), and patient healthcare records (PHRs). They are used for purposes spanning health data analytics, appointment booking, pharmacy medication reminders, telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), and secure access to information held in structured and unstructured repositories such as databases and medical imaging systems.
Healthcare institutions are also realizing the importance of AI-powered tools to bring cost savings, process efficiency, and better clinical outcomes. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates that AI applications will cut annual US healthcare costs by $150 billion – about $460 per person in the US – in 2026. Overall, these applications improve access to care, decision making, and communication with patients, specialists, suppliers, insurance carriers, billing departments, and risk management personnel. As such they need to be made HIPAA compliant and ensure data privacy and security.
However, a recent survey of National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK shows unreliable infrastructure and poorly performing systems compromise patient safety by making it difficult to quickly access vital information. Estimates show that 27% of clinicians lose over four hours of productive work each week as a result. Moreover, a survey on EHR Response Time & Reliability reveals that almost half (44%) of clinicians do not agree that their EHR is fast enough. In terms of system reliability, 23% of clinicians do not agree their EHR is available when needed.
Digital transformation among healthcare organizations, and the chronic lack of resources to support secure, always-on, performant digital experiences, means inefficient, unstable, and unavailable applications and infrastructure are more than mere inconveniences. Inability to access critical patient information in a timely manner due to poor application performance directly affects practitioners’ ability to deliver safe and effective care. The consequences are real. Consider a patient in crisis while a nurse waits for a slow application to help assess records and determine what medication can be safely administered. Or imagine the human cost of even an hour of downtime due to a data breach or broken applications programming interface (API) call – lives quite literally hang in the balance.
Observability aligns with organizational objectives The challenge for technologists in healthcare settings is managing the growing complexity of the disparate tools and technologies that support applications and the digital experiences they enable, while keeping them secure. They have often relied on monitoring solutions to understand the status of system performance and reliability, and a patchwork of security solutions to detect and fend off potential security threats, leading to the development of IT and operational silos. Just as medical telemetry systems capture patients’ vital signs and transmit them to a central monitor for analysis, multiple infrastructure and application monitoring tools capture and leverage metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) — collectively referred to as telemetry data — to provide some level of insight into the state of each of the underlying layers of virtualization, serverless components, APIs, and multi-cloud configurations. However, they are simply a means to identify whether systems are operating outside of pre-determined baselines. They deliver a torrent of unmanageable alerts on anomalous behavior that must be analyzed and prioritized in real time by beleaguered IT and security teams. Monitoring also falls short in providing cross-domain and service delivery insight, information about operational dependencies, and the ability to predict the likely consequences of a given status. Lack of standardization and interoperability across data-driven systems and solutions also poses a critical challenge, contributing to growing burdens of cost and time from the need to support manual workflows that manage and align disparate data sources. As a result, identifying the root causes of performance problems can be extraordinarily complex and is often so time-consuming that problems are sometimes ignored unless critical. This has created blind spots where technologists encounter significant delays in identifying performance and security issues, triaging and fixing them. Technologists have needed to rely on an IT war room approach to troubleshooting performance or security problems, gathering experts from cross-functional teams to assess whether the root cause lies within their area of responsibility. This is painfully expensive as numerous team members spend time investigating issues that were never theirs to find or resolve.
The Cisco answer is observability over the full application stack – Cisco Full-Stack Observability. It is more than simply a path to digitization or an advancement in monitoring capabilities, but rather a strategic asset. It cuts through the clutter by using the information contained within vast streams of incoming MELT generated by healthcare IT systems and applications to create actionable recommendations and insights tied to organizational and clinical objectives. Our experience at Cisco is that healthcare institutions can capitalize key principles around Cisco Full-Stack Observability for succeeding in the digital-first world. A shift away from siloed monitoring and reacting to performance and security problems into a proactive stance where potential issues can be identified and addressed before they become problems changes the game entirely.
The Cisco Full-Stack Observability portfolio includes infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, business performance management, digital experience monitoring, application security, application optimization and logs, with business context. Cisco Observability Platform brings together Cisco observability capabilities on a common platform with a unified data model and allows extensibility by third parties. Collectively, these solutions allow healthcare organizations to improve interactions with patients and ecosystem partners, control costs, streamline operations, and better manage the regulatory landscape. They empower delivery of the best patient care experiences and increase staff productivity by helping technologists provide secure, real-time access to patient data via performant, always-available clinical and operational systems.
Improving the end-user digital experience For organizations under pressure to increase access to healthcare outcomes and patient engagement, secure and reliable digital experiences are crucial. Telehealth, RPM options, and secure access to personal healthcare information are now baseline expectations. When the applications that enable these interactions don’t function reliably, lives may be at stake. Cisco Full-Stack Observability provides a user-centric view that bolsters digital-first healthcare delivery and patient engagement by providing better visibility into back-end systems that support them. Cisco Full-Stack Observability capabilities include digital experience monitoring (DEM) and application dependency monitoring for both hybrid and cloud-native applications. This gives healthcare IT teams actionable insights into digital experiences that can help them to ensure performant, secure applications and underlying infrastructure. These capabilities also enhance visibility into existing clinical systems and the applications that touch the digital front door through which patients access records, schedule appointments, receive virtual care, and manage payments. Conversely, contact centers can scale services and support high call volumes while understanding how issues with the network and connected applications impact the user experience. Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) allows technologists to dig even deeper by correlating application performance data with network metrics and intelligence to reveal anything that impacts the user experience. For example, if a bug is causing a potential lag in a scheduling app or slowing clinical point-of-care (POC) documentation devices, that could create needless frustration for patients and lower quality of care. Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions pinpoint the issue and help healthcare IT teams address it before the end-user even notices there is a problem. This helps patients get the care they need faster and more efficiently, and in the longer term means providers can build trust, support workflow portability, and cut down on the approximately 25-50% of nursing time spent on documentation. Application dependency monitoring combines real-time application dependency mapping with network data, extending visibility even further to include connectivity. The intrinsic dependencies of healthcare applications means that a single failure can have a cascading effect…
