†Nyansa, a fast-growing technology innovator of next generation infrastructure management solutions, announced integration support for wireless monitoring and telemetry systems as well as emerging Wi-Fi only voice/data systems within its popular Voyance user performance management platform. Now, hospitals will now be able to automatically analyze, track and measure the performance of vital IoT devices to ensure the highest performance over the network.
As more and more medical devices, sensors and monitors are going wireless, the ability to quickly and accurately determine the health and performance of these emerging IoT devices has eluded hospitals with a profound impact on patient care.
“This is the sort of technical innovation that really changes the game for the healthcare industry and hospital systems like ours in particular,” said†Bryan Totten, Mobility Architect at Mission Health based in†Asheville, North Carolina. “We must know how these devices are behaving on the network in order to use them with any sort of assurance. These monitors and wireless staff communications systems†are†valuable†assets in the care of our patients and for the productivity of our patient care staff.”
If clinicians can’t receive data on these devices in real time or at all, first responders aren’t able to properly monitor vital patient information. Moreover, staff are immobilized and terribly inefficient when they must remain in close proximity to patient monitors, and on-call and specialist staff are not able to be notified in a timely fashion, losing critical minutes to respond to urgent patient scenarios.
“Technology advances like this are vital within healthcare for us to be able to quickly and confidently move to a more wireless-centric environment that helps improve the experience for clinicians, doctors, staff, and patients,” Totten concluded.
ENSURING THE BEST NETWORK PRFORMANCE FOR BEDSIDE MONITORS
Nyansa has now developed the ability to parse the proprietary network protocols spoken between specific bedside monitors and data viewers at the central station. Parsing these protocols enables the unique ability to calculate client experience metrics such as how well the heart rate, oxygen levels, and other vitals are being received by monitoring viewers at central care stations. This user experience data is then fed into Voyance, Nyansa’s user management performance platform.
As a new data source into the Voyance platform, all waveform telemetry data is automatically analyzed and correlated across the full-stack of network data analytics currently available within Voyance. This gives IT teams a faster, more complete and accurate picture of the performance of these mission-critical devices on the network.
Traditional infrastructure management has primarily used Wi-Fi measurements to determine client behavior – assuming that if the Wi-Fi infrastructure sees the client is†healthy,†everything is operating properly. But this is not always the case as essential device information is excluded from conventional tools.
For bedside monitors, if only traditional Wi-Fi values such†as signal-to-noise†ratio (SNR), signal strength and layer 2 retries are examined, the client should be having issues, yet the waveform packets are still being transmitted just fine.
By blending client-side waveform telemetry device data into Voyance, and correlating it with the analysis of Wi-Fi, network service and applications performance, a much more meaningful metric is achieved. This provides IT staff a much more accurate and quantifiable view into precisely how wireless bedside monitors are actually performing.
“Until now, we’ve simply had no easy way to analyze, measure and track the performance of what is a new era of mobile medical devices,†operating on a customer’s wireless network to which we have limited visibility,” said†Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “With Voyance by Nyansa, there is now a real-time†and historical view†into the performance and behavior of these devices across the entire network. This has been an ongoing industry concern that, until now, no one has really tackled.”
Armed with this new data, healthcare IT teams immediately gain a variety of insights not previously possible. These include, but are not limited to: the automatic root cause analysis of monitor connectivity issues, problematic monitors, the baseline behavior of bedside monitor performance and the amount of traffic monitors are sending and receiving.
COMPLETE TRANSPARENCY INTO MOBILE VOICE AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS
Today, physicians nurses, assistants, and support staff often use a number of different devices, such†as†pagers, walkie talkies, multicast push-to-talk devices and even personal smart phones to communicate with each other. Managing the performance of every different device type on the network has become a massive challenge for IT staff.
Consequently, many Healthcare institutions around the world are working to unify voice and data mobile communications among clinical staff using secure, purpose-built Wi-Fi-only voice and messaging solutions. Ensuring the best possible performance of these systems over the network is key to the successful integration, use and value of these new UC systems.
Many of these new systems, from vendors such as Ascom, a global provider of healthcare ICT and mobile workflow solutions, now support the ability for each device to send specific SYSLOG data to a central server.
Access to and integration of this data into Voyance, now allows automatic and constant analysis of the performance of every user device on the network – providing complete transparency of voice and messaging performance on a per device basis, on a real-time and historical basis, with the ability to automatically correlate these insights across the entire IP stack.
This allows healthcare IT staff to do things not previously possible, such as quickly determine problem coverage areas impacting device performance and the quality of every call. They also can find and fix anomalies or irregularities causing device disconnects and other problems impacting poor device performance.
