“The big challenge in healthcare is, you’ve got a gamut of technology, right? You’ve got stuff ranging from the 80s that hasn’t really changed much. And you end up supporting these systems.”
That’s Uzair Khan, RUSH University Medical Center’s Manager of Network Services. A few weeks ago, he sat down with Eric Chou and Ethan Banks of Packet Pushers to discuss the ins and outs of managing — and automating — their complex IT infrastructure environment. You can listen to that conversation here. We also covered the top-line highlights of the podcast in another blog here.
Let’s dive a little deeper into why that infrastructure is so complex — and how medical and healthcare organizations can build an automation and orchestration strategy that gets the most out of a distributed infrastructure landscape.
Healthcare IT Infrastructure Challenges
Scale, Legacy Devices, Remote Sites, & Strict Requirements
“Healthcare is so unique. We see it, we all consume it one way or another, but really to see the complexities and challenges behind the scenes, it’s been an eye opener.”
Early in the podcast, Uzair talks through his career journey leading up to RUSH Medical — a journey that included a lot of networking experience, but up to that point, no healthcare. In his words, coming into RUSH and seeing the sheer scale and complexity of the IT infrastructure behind patient care was “an eye opener.”
So what is it about healthcare IT that surprised even an expert network engineer?
Three words: scale, compliance, and stakes.
Scale
Healthcare networks include a wide variety of devices, applications, and services, from patient monitoring systems to printers, to WAN and ambulatory remote sites, to legacy machines that use protocols most network teams never have to deal with — on top of the complex, multi-domain, multi-vendor network infrastructure that can be found at any organization in any industry.
Healthcare processes are also often very complex, with more IT infrastructure touchpoints, than they seem from the outside. Ensuring the right data and the right outputs are delivered to the right people, machines, and systems quickly is key — and like many medical systems, RUSH has multiple hospitals and a number of remote WAN and ambulatory sites that require network connectivity.
“We’ve got hundreds of sensors, so many different systems, different people watching it. You’re thinking it’s a sensor, but there’s some intelligence behind it, it ties into other systems—and how that gets recorded and charted, and every little thing that’s being monitored, just to see the tools and backend infrastructure supporting all of this—it’s impressive.”
Compliance
Healthcare IT environments must comply with strict requirements and security controls in a number of areas. Patient data must be kept secure and private to follow legal requirements, and a certain number of specific device types must be kept connected and operational to meet patient safety requirements. In addition, healthcare IT infrastructure is especially vulnerable to cyber threats — especially recently, as targeted attacks on healthcare systems have increased. At RUSH, the team must ensure that software upgrades, security patches, and compliance checks happen seamlessly across multiple locations — hospitals, ambulatory sites, and remote offices — without interrupting critical services.
Stakes
Most networks support critical operations in one way or another, but in healthcare, the stakes are especially clear. Downtime or incidents can delay critical care, compromise sensitive patient data, negatively impact treatment decisions, or disrupt the very workflows that enable life-saving care. At RUSH, like in any healthcare IT environment, ensuring speed, efficiency, and reliability isn’t just a goal — it’s a necessity.
Solving IT Challenges with Orchestration
One of the critical challenges the team at RUSH Medical aimed to solve was the mundane but essential operational tasks that often impact patient care — including IP reservations for printers. Uzair describes these operational tasks as a significant drain on the team’s capacity before they adopted Itential’s orchestration platform.
Printers, which might not be the first device on your mind when thinking about healthcare IT, play a surprisingly key role in healthcare operations. From printing patient wristbands in the ED to supporting daily workflows and generating paper records, printers must always be up and connected to the network.
However, managing printers on the network is far from simple. Due to strict security and compliance requirements in healthcare, there are stringent controls around how devices are connected to the network.
When a printer malfunctions, the impact is immediate: clinical staff must borrow from other departments, disrupting workflows and delaying care. Meanwhile, engineers must interrupt their priority projects to handle time-consuming tasks like IP changes, port adjustments, or workflow updates, which can create further delays across other workflows.
Itential gave the team the ability to build orchestrated workflows that could be delivered as self-serve outcomes. This would reduce the reliance on network engineers for routine printer-related issues by introducing self-service capabilities for field technicians. This approach not only accelerates printer repairs but also improves the quality of life for engineers, eliminating after-hours disruptions for tasks that can be automated or streamlined and freeing up time for more critical tasks.
How Itential’s Platform Supports Healthcare IT Transformation
As Uzair discusses in his Packet Pushers episode, partnering with Itential gave his team new ways to manage their infrastructure, orchestrating end-to-end workflows across their distributed networks and systems to drive efficient outcomes and support patient care. Our platform is built to integrate with a wide variety of systems and devices, allowing even legacy healthcare-specific machinery to be integrated and embedded into automation and orchestration efforts, all while configuration consistency is maintained.
Now, they’re orchestrating multiple processes and working towards ambitious goals — including delivering a wide variety of infrastructure services as self-serve products across their network, and orchestrating rapid blocking of security threats across their distributed infrastructure to respond to alerts within seconds.
By providing the framework for healthcare infrastructure teams to streamline operations and deliver services much more quickly, we’re helping our customers reach the next level for healthcare IT. In a field where speed and reliability count for so much and every second can make the difference, orchestration can transform the way IT infrastructure enables high-quality care.
Tyler Lochan
Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential
Tyler Lochan is a Technical Content Specialist at Itential. Tyler is a Georgia Tech grad who began his career as a technology consultant in financial services. He has a passion for bringing his technical expertise together with writing, and he focuses on creating content to support our customers as they navigate their network automation journeys.
