Can Wire Data Monitoring Streamline Health IT Performance?

January 20, 2016 - While the vast majority of technology professionals would give almost anything to be able to design a fully functional, streamlined, interoperable health IT infrastructure from the ground up, the reality of the reality of the healthcare industry is such that a patchwork of legacy systems and piecemeal products can make seamless operations nearly impossible.

Understanding how data moves from point to point along a convoluted, segmented network can be difficult at the best of times, and a hitch in the system that slows performance or shuts down services could be disastrous for patient care.

As healthcare providers come to rely more and more fully on their technology suites for documentation, communication, and clinical decision support on the upper decks of the organization, overcoming data siloes and keeping tabs on speed, reliability, and value downstairs could be the difference between a successful initiative and a departmental failure.

Wire data is a byproduct of big data analytics technologies and the cavalcade of other IT systems that keep a hospital or healthcare organizations humming along.  In contrast to machine data, which is a historical record of concrete user actions like phone call time stamps or authorship notes in an EHR, wire data is a type of metadata, or information about information. 

It can be thought of as a “readable signature” of how one piece of data moves between points, and it can provide valuable metrics for monitoring and quality control.  Wire data can help organizations pinpoint potential points of failure, draw conclusions about the presence of data siloes that prevent interoperability, and even prevent downtime.

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Giving the IT department its own set of analytical tools can be a critical step towards achieving a free-flowing big data infrastructure.  A recent survey by ExtraHop, one of the many vendors offering wire data monitoring toolsets, found that sixty-five percent of Fortune 1000 organizations participating in the poll are currently using multiple data sources for IT operations analytics (ITOA) in an effort to discover and remove data siloes.

NetFort, another wire data analytics service provider, stated that in 2014, 76 percent of respondents to their own survey were using wire data monitoring tools. 

“Most organizations already have some sort of monitoring tool that tells them when devices go offline, but senior management within these organizations want more information, specifically, what users or applications are causing the problem,” said Darragh Delaney, Director of Technical Services of at NetFort Technologies. “Obtaining a clear visibility into network activity across the network, not just at the edge, is critical for organizations.”

Users of the technology said they were searching for deeper insights into bandwidth consumption, application performance, internet activity monitoring, and breakdowns of traffic by application and by user.

The company predicted that an increase in the implementation of cloud services, big data analytics technologies, and software-as-a-service applications will ramp up the demand for wire data monitoring technologies that deliver insights without breaking the bank.

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“As awareness of big data matures, we are seeing faster and more widespread adoption of ITOA technology, and the importance of wire data as a source of insight has become a key topic in conversations with our customers,” said Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop’s CEO.

“Businesses rely on IT as the lifeblood of their organizations, so the stakes are high for keeping that machine running as efficiently as possible. That’s where ITOA has really proven itself as a high-value, must-have initiative.”

Ninety-three percent of survey respondents said that wire data management was “foundational” to their internal IT analytics game plans, due in part to the objectivity and scope of the data.

Wire data monitoring allows organizations to see the “big picture” when trying to juggle dozens – or hundreds – of the disparate IT systems in operation at any given time in the hospital setting, said David Higginson, Chief Information Officer at Phoenix Children’s hospital in Arizona.

“When it comes to growing an IT department and supporting the hospital, we can’t look at things inside of siloes,” he said.  “If we’re seeing poor performance in application, we need to understand all the elements, whether that's storage, memory, compute, network, SQL service, tuning, or whatever it may be.”

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“The advantage of using a wire data monitoring tool is that it's always on,” he added.  “So, whenever something happens, we can immediately go back to whatever timeframe we need to and start looking at where the issue lies.”

“You can take the network data, the storage data, the compute data, and maybe the actual things happening inside the database and time-sync them together, so that you can really see how all five or six factors that affect the environment are all operating at the same time.  That’s much more efficient than looking in six different tools and trying to piece that picture together.”