Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to meet the growing demand for personalized healthcare. Besides, business models and the face of technology are changing fast. To support businesses, enterprise networks have become the foundation to deliver a more meaningful and positive experience- one that physicians, nurses, administrators, R&D personnel, and patients can rely on. We discuss this with top enterprise tech experts from the healthcare and the pharma sectors who throw more light on how having the right networking strategy can enable customer experience and business growth.
Unique Tech Challenges
We all know how important it is to derive real-time information and communication. Data must be accessible whenever it is required.
When patients were locked out at their homes due to Covid-19’s outbreak that “exposed this broken system. 80% of healthcare is delivered outside the hospitals,” Dr Satish Prasad Rath, Group CIO, Aster DM Healthcare said. Very few systems in the world were geared for this struggle. The traditional ways of healthcare could not serve their patients, even if patients wanted to be served. All bodily problems can be checked without walking into a hospital but this was mostly realized due to the outbreak.
“As a patient, now they’d want to reach the hospitals through their phones and they shouldn’t have to worry about security and VPN. Equally keeping the quality and security aspect of it,” Dr Rath said. Security and quality are the two big gambits or requirements, from infrastructure and networking solutions, and healthcare and security solutions.
A pharmaceutical perspective
Jitendra Mishra, Vice President and Group CIO at Alembic Pharmaceuticals feeld Covid-19 has been a big opportunity for the pharma sector.
“Covid is transforming us. Earlier through digital transformation, things were moving in a four to five-year phase but now they are happening rapidly. Faster innovations in new drug discovery is one highlight revolving around today’s pharmaceutical industry. India’s success story in vaccines for this virus outbreak has been extremely high, despite the amount of diversity and poverty prevailing in the country. The major challenges for the pharma is that now we can manage our core plans and regulations,” Mishra added. Thanks to the technology as it has given opportunities to conduct businesses seamlessly.
Building a network for a positive experience
Real-time monitoring was a big concern during the covid time and protecting the healthcare workers were as important. AI played an essential part here where one can extract data from all medical equipment. This helped at a hospital-level as well as a national level.
Building a model that has a responsive and secure network along with an innovative data bank is the need of the hour. In data banks, all pharmacy and healthcare-related parameters are covered. Data banks help to look for a group of people to test the drugs on or identifying repurposed drugs. Thorough participation with pharmaceutical industries is necessary for successful clinical trials.
There is a big opportunity for healthcare industries where they can promote research and help in improving the insights of on-going and previous researches. “Integrated Network Providers which has also got responsive GPU’s, as well as storage and AI containers, are the need of the hour and that would be very helpful,” Dr Rath said.
All companies will see a significant amount of changes in their business continuity policies and these policies must incorporate work from home and return to the office. Confidence must be given to the staff and workers and letting them know that they are safe in the workplace is essential and takes top priority.
State of the art network for business growth
Industries need to follow the three trends- Run, Grow and Transform. The Run trend takes the majority of any industry’s time which explains the operations optimization, access control, BYOD, Skype/O365/UCC QoS, and location services.
However, businesses need to allocate to ‘Grow’ and ‘Transform’. ‘Grow’ trend consists of the digital infrastructure, cloud, edge computing, IoT, and disaster recovery. Transform trend focuses more on human IoT monitoring which goes above and beyond pills or devices. When we talk about network, we talk about all the various devices- from the gateway, cellular backhaul, small site, indoor, wifi devices to twisted pair, BLE, RF, and other native ethernet devices.
All these devices, applications and services need to be managed seamlessly. All these devices need to be visible from one single device. This dependency has increased significantly at this time. All VDI, voice, video, telemetry, and guess access services should be able to co-habitat homogeneously.
