The Changing Role of Connectivity in Delivering First Class Healthcare Experiences

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In an era of accelerated healthcare digital transformation, what’s often missing in the discussion is the critical aspect of the network infrastructure. Because networks are largely invisible until they go down, even senior leadership may overlook this foundation for the 21st century integrated health system. However, like the vascular and immune systems of the human body, networks are truly the lifeblood of the healthcare enterprise.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare providers discovered that the network should – and could – have been a more strategic asset to the organization, perhaps more than originally perceived. And as healthcare delivery models continue to shift, IT leaders must ensure that the network can keep up with the demands of a threat-filled, highly distributed, and IoT-driven patient care world. It starts with taking a holistic look at the network from this point forward.

A healthy network puts the organization in a prime position to quickly scale and integrate emerging technologies that assist in driving better patient outcomes, as well the ability to safeguard all users, applications, and devices. However, this requires a deep level of visibility and understanding of user and device experiences – which is often lacking.

Unfortunately, traditional networking technologies are complex, which stifles IT acceleration, limits freedom of choice, and increases operational costs. Additionally, these legacy technologies cannot keep up with the emerging needs of the modern healthcare ecosystem. They are limited in terms of innovation and new functionality, which can slow the progress of a healthcare provider who likely is creating a culture of innovation. Take for example, Wireless LAN (WLAN) controllers, which were created over a decade ago. While the controller architecture was great for managing yesterday’s network of APs where wireless clients were limited and connectivity was merely seen as a convenience, they are not equipped for the modern era of mobility in medical environments. As more and more healthcare providers adopt a cloud-first mindset, it’s important to ask, “Shouldn’t the network strategy align to those key application strategies as well?” This is just one mission Juniper Networks strives to achieve.

WHO – WHAT – HOW
Personalized medical services and experiences are an emerging priority for healthcare. And with many ‘band-aided’ networks in medical environments today, unfortunately most are not intelligently built for the modern healthcare era. With decades of experience and working closely with customers who have the most stringent networking requirements and the thirst to modernize the IT stack, Juniper realizes that cloud and AI are an absolute necessity to carry networking into the next generation. The company’s vision has always been to create a solution that can troubleshoot and manage networks on par with human domain experts. Realizing that the only way to achieve this was building an industry-first, modern microservices cloud architecture with embedded AI/ML capabilities, Juniper is radically simplifying wired and wireless networking. With automated operations and support with real-time root cause analysis, Juniper helps providers significantly reduce time to resolution.

The virtual network assistant (known as Marvis) is the only solution in the industry that leverages both natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to answer complex questions using simple language queries. With Marvis, the world is transitioning from command line interfaces (CLIs) and dashboards to a conversational interface, which helps users manage and troubleshoot network issues with ease. Imagine having the network so fine-tuned that IT no longer has to frustrate a clinician to recreate an issue.

Additionally, Juniper uses embedded virtual Bluetooth LE (vBLE) array technology to help providers with reducing late or missed appointments by providing turn-by-turn directions, improving engagement with patients and guests through greetings or digital coupons, locating critical medical assets (ventilators, pumps, wheelchairs, etc.), and other location-based workflows or use cases.

Juniper is proud to be one of the few companies where the data science team is tied to the hip of the customer success team organizationally, ensuring the two feed off of each other and constantly learn from what users are experiencing. By unifying the wireless, wired, and wide area network (WAN) into a common architecture and AI schema, healthcare providers can truly deliver the best operator experiences from client-to-cloud. And with the continued swift adoption of the technology, Juniper is clearly separating the AI marketing hype from reality.

With nearly every healthcare provider worldwide needing to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiencies and simplify everyday tasks, there comes an opportunity to leverage technology to streamline and redefine workflows with minimal disruption. Juniper continues to help organizations reduce network help desk tickets by over 60%, improve provisioning time by more than 50%, as well as many other positive outcomes.

In solving these types of challenges that have plagued the industry for decades, Juniper was recently recognized in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure. Gartner positioned Juniper as a Leader, furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest in Ability to Execute across all vendors. Juniper sees this placement as a validation of our Leadership stance as the company continues to drive differentiation into the industry.