When the IT budget is flatlining… How can healthcare organizations optimize their networks to save more money?

30 April 2024

Clinical and IT staffing shortages. Tight budgets constraining day-to-day operations. Cybersecurity threats impacting clinical productivity and draining precious funds. Running a healthcare organization these days is no child’s play. However, many typical challenges attributed to cost-efficiency can be successfully mitigated with the right network foundation. Let’s see how hospitals and other medical facilities can save lives – and money!

While the healthcare sector spares no expense on new IT systems and solutions to address the evolving clinician demands and enhance the quality of patient care, many hospitals and other facilities often run into a number of technical and organizational difficulties that render said investments ineffective at best, futile at worst.

The results of a study conducted by Extreme Networks in partnership with HIMSS Market Insights shows that, despite the fact that healthcare institutions are committed to their digital transformation efforts, oftentimes they are still struggling with financial concerns and critical staffing shortages.

Where do the problems lie?

When asked to rank their biggest organizational challenges, survey respondents cited keeping clinical staffing at appropriate levels atop the list, with nearly one third (32%) ranking it as their number one challenge. Many organizations are looking to fill in the blanks with technology, but this often drives the need for IT workforce. Conversely, 65% of respondents admitted that IT staffing shortages have been “very impactful” or “somewhat impactful” in terms of having to delay important IT projects. Nearly the same percentage (66%) said that routine tasks now take longer due to a staff shortages. More than half (55%) report that resolution time to solve errors and other issues has increased.

While looking for next-level patient care and better operational efficiencies, healthcare organizations cannot lose sight of the importance of protecting themselves against bad actors. Cybersecurity was ranked by 29% as the number one priority, and as much as 59% of respondents placed it in their top 3 organizational challenges. Cybersecurity is also where the majority of respondents are prioritizing their IT investments (85%), along with advanced software applications for radiology, ultrasound, telehealth etc. (85%), as well as AI/ML applications (67%).

A ‘Bermuda Triangle’

As organizations are considering their IT investments, it’s important to realize that the digital transformation and cybersecurity aspects should not be treated separately. As practice shows, driving automation, reducing operating expenses and minimizing security risk is rather difficult to achieve without sacrificing one of those options for another, creating sort of a Bermuda Triangle in which many IT investments tend to dwindle and, ultimately, disappear.

So how can healthcare organizations navigate this storm and make it through the typical challenges unscathed? First of all, by treating their networks as a strategic asset. Investing in a robust and flexible infrastructure that will support all these bandwidth-hungry, next-generation applications in a secure and cost-efficient manner is paramount to driving the innovation healthcare organizations do desperately seek and getting the maximum value from every IT dollar spent.

Real-life examples from Extreme customers

By prioritizing their networks, healthcare operators can provide the most efficient and effective experience for patients while helping both IT staff and clinicians feel and act as their most productive selves. From there, we’re seeing Extreme customers who were able to effectively drive down costs, increase efficiencies, and optimize patient care.

For example, the ExtremeCloud IQ – Site Engine solution, has helped Groupe Jolimont in Belgium to considerably simplify and automate the management of the network.

ExtremeCloud IQ – Site Engine manages the entire auto-configuration of the users and their devices on the network, both wired and via Wi-Fi. This way, we have a self-driving network (…) When the hospital admits a patient for an intervention, the system records how many days this patient will stay at the hospital. By means of integration, ExtremeCloud IQ – Site Engine automatically knows on which days the patient should be able to access the Wi-Fi network. This doesn’t imply any manual configuration anymore.

Paul Tassin, Groupe Jolimont

By implementing a Fabric infrastructure, Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg (ZOL) another major healthcare provider in Belgium was able to reduce operational costs and network complexity while driving an extensive migration project. Today, a small IT team of four is able to provide seamless and secure connectivity for four campuses and thousands of access points, switches, and endpoints, with reduced costs, complexity and security risks.

Often, you have to figure out which segmentation rules the device needs because you're not aware of the security requirements it may have. Now we have our segmentation plan. We pick the right spot to put the device into, enter the authentication credentials, plug it in and it's segmented and secured by default. This enabled us to answer those kinds of questions very quickly and accelerate our pace of integration (…) You also need to consider the total cost of ownership, which only becomes clear if you're really deploying and getting to the nitty-gritty details of the implementation, since that’s usually when most of the hidden costs pop out. With the Extreme Fabric Connect solution delivered by Orange Cyberdefense, those kind of surprises were really limited to an absolute minimum (…) The segmentation of layer 2, the ability to hyper-segment in an easy way to have a multi-campus fabric solution in the edge that is very easy to use, with a highly scalable, but yet not very proprietary extensions… Taking all this into account leads me to strongly believe we made the best possible choice.

Kurt Gielen, Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg

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