NETSCOUT to Support HL7 Health IT Standards with nGeniusONE

November 01, 2016 - NETSCOUT announced their support of HL7 health IT standards in an effort to provide health data interoperability between different health IT systems.

Its nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform now provides proactive monitoring and troubleshooting for HL7 interoperability issues affecting patient admissions, scheduling and clinical care services.The platform gives users visibility across network domains, service enablers, and user devices. nGeniusONE applies a cohesive set of traffic-based analytics allowing organizations to identify and resolve issues quickly by providing multi-dimensional metrics.

Health Level Seven (HL7) is a non-profit standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services.

“A patient’s healthcare experience is going to be impacted by the performance of several different application services which all require HL7 to interact effectively,” NETSCOUT stated in their official release. “HL7 is the standard protocol used in the health services to transmit health information, including administrative and clinical data, between hospital information systems such as electronic health records (EHRs), radiology and digital imaging and e-prescription services.”

nGeniusONE gives organizations a complete picture of their patient care environment and reveals the interdependencies between service components that communicate via HL7 for more than a thousand well-known applications.

nGeniusONE and Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI)  provide visibility into the key services that shape the patient’s experience. Each function, including EHR, imaging and pharmacy, relies on applications and databases that are unique to their needs. nGeniusONE provides organizations with the ability to manage these functions in the same workflows used in managing HL7 and can easily identify where a problem may exist.

The collected information is enriched with data from individual HL7 fields that describe the transfer of administrative, scheduling, and record-keeping information, delivering a “holistic view that dramatically reduces the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) patient-impacting service issues.”

The nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and ASI technology helps organizations:

• Gain real-time visibility of all services and their network and application components.
• Proactively and predictively protect service availability and performance.
• Conduct comprehensive, multi-dimensional analysis of location, handset/device, service network performance in context with the performance of all dependencies.
• Perform session-level, as well as deep-dive, protocol-level analysis and forensic evidence collection
• Watch over all your systems, services and vulnerabilities vigilantly today and into the future

“CIOs are tasking application developers within our healthcare customers to rapidly create and deploy innovative, next-generation applications and technologies that improve the overall efficiency, quality, speed and security of patient care. In order for these applications to work effectively, they must integrate with HL7, a complete framework and associated communication and interoperability standard for electronic health information, to support healthcare services like patient records, diagnostic systems and accounting services,” said Thomas Raimondi, Jr., vice president, Enterprise Business Operations Group, NETSCOUT.

“By adding the HL7 support into nGeniusONE,” Raimondi continued, “IT staff and application developers will now have the most complete service assurance solution available to both accelerate the introduction of new applications and dramatically reduce the time it takes to pinpoint the root cause of performance impairments to patient care delivery services.”

Healthcare organizations looking to embrace analytics must have a full view of their network infrastructure and be able to handle the volume and variation of data coming being collected from clinicians and patients. Once an organization is able to properly store and analyze these metrics, the data can be used to improve patient care and interoperability.

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