In healthcare, network integrity is directly related to providing patient care and managing resources efficiently. Even minor network disruptions can affect access to electronic health records (EHRs), delay diagnostic services, and disrupt communications in your hospitals and clinics. Each hour of network downtime can have an impact on operational stability and patient outcomes.

According to the Ponemon Institute, healthcare organizations lose an average of $7,500 per minute of downtime. In hospitals with high patient volumes, a one-hour outage could result in half a million dollars in losses due to delayed procedures and lost appointments, which doesn’t even take into account the effects on patient trust and healthcare quality.

A Costly Scenario of Network Disruption

One of our current customers is a US healthcare provider with over 400,000 patient visits a year across multiple locations. Using that as our guide, let’s run some numbers to see what a routine network update with an accidental routing misconfiguration would look like (this exact human error scenario brought Meta – Facebook, Instagram, etc – down for several hours in recent years). This would result in network downtime across diagnostic systems, appointment booking systems, and patient monitoring devices. Hospitals with patients in critical care would likely have backup systems, but the clinics may not. This would impact thousands of patients and potential patients.

Without the ability to do immediate root cause analysis, these systems remain offline, delaying patient check-ins, blocking access to EHRs, and even stopping essential diagnostic imaging – or at least the electronic delivery and communications of images. Financially, if each clinic visit averages $250 in billable services, a single hour of network disruption could cost about $100,000 in lost revenue per hour.

Supporting Broader Organizational Goals

By looking at several annual reports from our customers in healthcare and others, commonly listed initiatives for 2024 and beyond are investing in the advancement of patient care, research initiatives, education, and community health programs. Let’s consider these through the lens of network resilience:

• Patient Care and Specialty Clinics: For providers hosting hundreds of thousands of patient visits a year, continuity in clinical services is of the utmost importance. Network assurance ensures that high-demand clinics (ex: chronic pain management, mental health, and urgent care services) maintain uninterrupted service, supporting their mission of patient-centered care. By reducing network downtime from hours to minutes, providers can save an estimated $100,000 per hour in billable services.
• Research Initiatives: Many healthcare institutions rely on grant-funded research projects to make advancements in areas like respiratory disease, opioid misuse, and chronic illness management. Network disruptions, especially those caused by security breaches can compromise private information, intellectual property, and discourage grants, perhaps jeopardizing millions of dollars a year in funding. Network mapping and assurance tells you exactly what’s on your network and whether it’s in configuration and regulatory compliance.
• Educational Programs: Residency and fellowship training programs remain a focus in healthcare. Network resilience supports the infrastructure needed to run educational programs, especially in this time of remote learning, and ensures that systems remain accessible for students across multiple learning environments.
• Patient Trust and Community Health: With continuity in operations, healthcare providers build patient trust, an important component for community-centered projects like health equity programs, which often rely on pop-up clinics having operational networks. Also ensuring patient trust, is the ability to know what needs to be secured. If you don’t know it exists, it’s not receiving proper security and compliance policies. According to The HIPAA Journal, a data breach at a hospital costs almost $10M in 2024.

For healthcare providers, investing in network assurance is an investment in financial stability and operational stability. With IP Fabric healthcare organizations can reduce the risk of extended downtime by 95%, safeguarding critical revenue streams.

Network Assurance with IP Fabric

Using IP Fabric Network Assurance, healthcare providers can mitigate these outages, performance and network downtime issues across their entire network infrastructure. Especially in healthcare, issues are not limited to single silos such as the data center, campus, or branch. IP Fabric gives you the end-to-end visibility you need to keep life-saving equipment up and running in all parts of your network.

Network assurance is more than just keeping the lights on (in some cases, though, it quite literally keeps the lights on). It minimizes financial risk, protects patients, and maintains regulatory compliance – ensuring IT teams can work together effectively and focus on long-term improvements rather than reactive troubleshooting.

IP Fabric offers:

• Automated Discovery and Mapping: Deep visibility across layer 1-4 devices and protocols, paths, states, configurations, and dependencies, keeping healthcare IT teams proactive and on the same page.
• Regulatory Compliance and Monitoring: Built-in and custom compliance checks reducing regulatory risks and the cost of audits and remediation.
• Digital Twin Capabilities: Going beyond mapping and modeling to single device what-if scenario testing.

Are you confident in your healthcare network’s resilience? Let’s discuss the steps your organization can take to strengthen its network infrastructure and support its mission for patient-centricity. Check out our Case Study on United Hospitals of Morcombe Bay NHS Foundation Trust.

Or you can try IP Fabric for yourself with our free, self-guided demo here.