Industry drivers causing rapid change in IT infrastructure

With the widespread adoption of Internet technologies for business communication the healthcare industry has found new challenges to survival.  By making patient information - everything from private medical records to financial payment data - available on the Internet, healthcare providers are exposing their customers to a host of threats ranging from identity theft to potential blackmail and worse. In an industry where privacy and confidentiality are the foundation of the doctor/patient relationship, such risks are unacceptable and have spawned Government regulation to ensure national standards.

Regulations - HIPAA
One of the biggest drivers of IT change in the Healthcare industry is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.  While introduced in 1996 its compliance requirements are vast and demanding such that, despite successive extensions, many leading healthcare organizations are still either building new implementations or responding to bruising audit reports on their shortcomings.   Essentially HIPPA sets new standards for the privacy and security of patient's sensitive information requiring Healthcare institutions to invest heavily in new infrastructure for information availability, redundancy, monitoring and security.  Failure to comply with Federal HIPAA regulations can result in heavy penalties, even jail time for healthcare managers in violation. 

Regulations - SOX
Another significant driver of IT change in healthcare institutions is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).   Affecting all public companies traded on US stock exchanges SOX primarily focuses on IT security and requires companies to assess any risk associated with information technology or the internal process that may impact the accurate and timely reporting of financial information.  Similar to HIPAA this regulation is a major driver of new Corporate level sensitivity to IT infrastructural change in this industry.

Issues moving from today's reality to compliance

Whatever approach companies adopt to compliance the issues affecting new architecture implementations are similar for all.  These include the following: 

• Costs

New infrastructure includes mass storage, higher bandwidth networks, datacenter consolidation, redundancy and security.  On SOX alone, it is estimated that companies will spend two percent of their total revenue on compliance - up to $2 million per every $100 million company.  This level of expenditure requires that the company ensure maximum transparency and leverage the ROI potential.

• Time

Too often the actual implementation time falls outside the allowed time for compliance.  While extensions are given end users are more often forced to meet punishing deadlines that department and senior level execs, as well as auditors, are rarely patient with. 

• Managing convergence across multiple regions

While HIPAA is ultimately intended to standardize the processes and make portable the patient's information across all US healthcare institutions the process for each healthcare company in achieving this standard is more challenging for some than others.  Technology convergence requires widespread change to  IT architectures.  This process is made significantly worse when the organization is international and each region's IT department is autonomous.  Changes for these companies tend to affect the organization on multiple levels.

Other ongoing reasons for structural change in IT deployments include integration of networks resulting from Mergers and Acquisitions activity in a continuing trend toward globalization.  The affects of this are felt by IT managers who now find the implementation of upgrades, transitions and convergences more difficult to manage than before.

The question that vendors must answer for the healthcare industry is how implementation of compliance and other structural changes to the monitoring infrastructure can be made pervasive at price levels that are affordable!
VSS monitoring is a leader in network monitoring because it is enabling total visibility throughout the network while reducing deployment costs of the monitoring infrastructure by up to 80%.  On the next page we'll see how.