Networking News

Health IT Infrastructure Automation Supports Tech Growth

Health IT Infrastructure automation can help organizations handle the expected growth in advanced technology adoption in the coming year.

health IT infrastructure automation

Source: Thinkstock

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- With 2018 rapidly approaching, organizations are looking to continue their digital transformation by investing in advanced digital tools to increase workflow, improve patient care, and reduce IT costs. These complex digital tools may call for health IT infrastructure automation as IT administrators struggle to manage their network.

The digital healthcare market is expected to grow significantly over the next several years as a CAGR of 13 percent through 2025, according to a recent Research and Markets report.

“Digital transformation is becoming a mainstream technology in healthcare sector as healthcare organizations are focused towards offering improved services to patients so as to enhance their overall experience,” report authors stated. “Ongoing technological advancements in the healthcare industry is encouraging major hospitals and organizations to shift towards customer-centered business model.”

Entities are deploying more tools to digitally monitor patients to get a better understanding of their conditions. Wearables, patient monitoring devices, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices play a large part in the customer-centric business model. However, these devices need to be supported by a solid IT infrastructure that will allow organizations to expand digitally over the next few years and continue to adopt advanced and secure tools.

Healthcare organizations need to expand their infrastructure beyond the walls of their facilities and consider how remote devices used for patient monitoring and telehealth can connect securely to the network. Entities also must account for the toll IoT devices can take on network bandwidth and capacity as well as cloud connectivity.

Adding more advanced tools to address these challenges can be complicated, but automating as many processes as possible can help ease the burden on IT staff.

A recent Market Research Future report predicted that the global healthcare IoT security market will reach $15.82 billion, growing at a CAGR of 22 percent from 2016 to 2022.

“IoT can be remotely controlled and is highly automated across existing network infrastructure, resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention,” researchers explained.

Automating infrastructure security, network management, and cloud deployments gives IT administrators much needed visibility into and control over newly introduced devices and tools.

Introducing automation into network security and management lets organizations automate mundane tasks that are simple, but take up time. Automation will allow network administrators to use their time on projects that take more expertise and also saves organizations money on staff.

Automation is being used throughout health IT infrastructure as a way to utilize IT staff to their full potential, and it eliminates human error for data intensive tasks and also helps organizations maintain reliable and correct backup and recovery solutions as well as cloud.

Last year, a 451 Research survey found that IT departments are struggling to manage their increasingly IT infrastructure environments.  

“IT departments being tasked with transformation to cloud-based infrastructure are struggling with the challenges and complexity of managing multiple environments, and our research shows that a majority of the platform providers they turn to today are falling short in supporting that transformation,” 451 Research Vice President William Fellows said in a statement.

“As enterprises continue along the cloud maturity curve, we anticipate a sharp demand for cloud automation, self-service and provisioning capabilities as they seek to increase efficiency, flexibility, spend, and agility,” Fellows added.

Health IT infrastructure is rapidly becoming more advanced and organizations are expected to add new tools to their IT environment over the coming year. Organizations need to assess their goals for 2018 and consider how they can deploy new tools while still being able to manage the network. Automation can be good option for entities who may not be able to afford more IT staff, but want to explore more technologically advanced IT infrastructure opportunities.