Many healthcare providers have been slow to get on the information highway. Once on it, however, doctors, nurses and others in the field often find that the network is jammed with electronic medical and billing records, digital imaging files and other patient- and provider-related information. Electronic information has become an important part of healthcare management and general patient care, so when the network is bottlenecked, the whole healthcare system slows down with it.

Based in Atlanta, Ga., Prime Care Technologies (PCT) helps healthcare providers manage IT operations to ensure doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff have the tools they need to deliver fast and reliable patient service. With a majority of its clients in the long-term care and assisted-living industries, PCT works with providers to offer a wide range of IT-related services, including application hosting, managed services, remote access, networking services, and hardware and software support, to improve the quality and speed of resident care. For example, when PCT sees that a client’s software application is performing slowly, the company works with the client to deploy methods to optimize network performance.

As part of its hosting service, and like most IT departments and application service providers, PCT manages a broadband connection shared among multiple clients and users. To address bandwidth limitations before they became an issue and avoid costly expansions of its network infrastructure, PCT looked for ways to implement network policies to better manage bandwidth utilization.

“Healthcare providers rely on time-sensitive information in order to provide the best quality healthcare possible to their patients,” says Peter Teichert, PCT vice president of operations. “We needed a way to ensure that, as our business grew, our clients continued to have fast access to their applications and files. We needed to be sure network latency issues did not interfere with access to their critical applications or their daily operations. At the same time, we wanted to avoid having to purchase additional bandwidth, which would increase our operational costs.”

To optimize network performance, PCT first needed to see inside the network to understand what types of applications and user behaviors were consuming bandwidth. Armed with detailed traffic information, PCT could determine how to improve access for applications critical to patient/resident care and healthcare provider operations.

For example, PCT clients need to quickly access operational software applications such as billing, accounting and electronic health records management. For these clients, such applications are more important than day-to-day e-mail, file and data transfers, and various print jobs.

“Our goal was to eliminate latency as an issue for our clients’ mission-critical applications and manage traffic in a way where critical traffic and activities were automatically prioritized over non-critical ones,” Teichert says.

PCT looked at a number of options for broadband traffic analysis and management and chose Allot Communications’ NetEnforcer AC402. Teichert liked the idea that he could set up one device on the network and monitor all customer network traffic without having to deal with a lot of device maintenance.

The product gave PCT visibility into its network to inspect, identify and analyze hundreds of applications and protocols. Using deep-packet inspection (DPI) technology, the NetEnforcer identifies content in both the packet header and payload. The solution segments traffic by protocol, application and user patterns, offering detailed visibility into both real-time and historical trends in network utilization. This level of visibility–understanding the protocols and applications on the network and how they are behaving–was the first step in allowing PCT to control traffic and optimize network performance.

Once Teichert completed the network analysis, his engineering team was able to create network policies to intelligently manage the way resources were allocated to various applications on the network. These policies rely on DPI for application recognition and enable PCT to classify traffic and assign actions to various traffic classes.

If print jobs are regularly hindering network performance, for example, Teichert can create a pre-set application control policy to throttle this traffic, opening up more bandwidth for critical applications. Policies can also be set to maintain a minimum or maximum level of available bandwidth. Finance applications, for instance, can be set to a specified minimum level during normal business hours but switch to a maximum level during off hours.

“To guarantee that critical medical applications and files could be accessed quickly, we needed to create policies that assigned levels of priority to different application and file types,” Teichert explains. “NetEnforcer AC402 provides the ability to prioritize traffic based on protocol, application type or other patterns. It allows us to manage the network and ward off network issues before they become issues.”

Having the NetEnforcer in place helps PCT provide a higher level of service to its base of healthcare providers. The ability to monitor the network and identify the root cause of latency issues has allowed PCT to detect issues before they become problems. In the event of a sudden slowdown, PCT now has the resources in place to identify and fix the problem immediately. This has resulted in faster customer services to all PCT’s clients.

“We want to provide the best possible service to our clients,” Teichert says. “Managing the network up front is a huge part of that, but being responsive to problems that do arise is also critical. NetEnforcer gives us the ability to do both, and it has really paid off. Slowdowns and latency problems are simply not an issue for our clients any more.”

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