Observability Is Preventive Medicine to Lower MTTR for Healthcare Organizations

Hospitals, medical buildings, urgent care facilities, doctors’ private offices, and clinics are among the variety of different facilities where people receive medical care. Regardless of the actual location, quality patient care experience is necessary for maintaining safe and swift treatment for the individual as well as protecting and assuring staff productivity and healthcare revenue.

Healthcare by the Numbers

Assuring quality digital experience for all the locations where medical care is provided—hospitals, clinics, medical offices, and urgent care facilities—may be a more substantial effort than one might assume.

Let’s look at healthcare by the numbers:

• Globally, there are more than 200,000 hospitals
• There are more than 7,000 hospitals in North America (6,093 in U.S. and 1,017 in Canada)
• There are more than 14,000 centers in the U.S. providing urgent care services, with more than 2 million patient visits per year
• Medical, mental health, and women’s health are among the specific services delivered from nearly 32,000 clinics in the U.S.
• Driven by growth in diagnostic tools, increasing need for remote patient monitoring, improvements in wireless technology, and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, the number of healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) devices in use is expected to explode from more than 47 million in 2025 to 67 million in 2028
• It is estimated that there are as many as 15 connected devices per hospital bed

This is a lot of data to consume; however, from a summary perspective there are many, many locations and devices used to help deliver patient treatment and care. They require consistent, high-quality performance and user experience—in many cases for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Performance Risks

Performance disruptions and outages impacting the locations or devices being used can be devastating to patients. Inability to log into patient healthcare records, pull down clear diagnostic images, or verify patient prescription interactions means delays in diagnosis, treatment plans, and patient care, as well as time lost for care providers that could have been used to see more patients.  

Delayed patient care and medical staff productivity loss are just part of the picture when it comes to risks to healthcare organizations. Other risks include:

• In hospitals with high patient volumes, just a one-hour outage could result in half a million dollars in losses due to delayed procedures and lost appointments—not to mention the incalculable cost to patient care and trust
• Fines associated with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance violations can range significantly and run into tens of thousands to more than a million dollars, depending on the issues and patient impact

Application and Network Outages Happen! What Can You Do?

As most IT professionals will admit, network and application service disruptions happen. This is not an “if” situation—it is a “when.” Anyone in healthcare IT operations during the June 2024 CrowdStrike outage can detail the impact on their hospital, medical office, urgent care facility, and/or clinic. Globally, these facilities found themselves powerless to access patient records, set appointments, conduct telehealth appointments, or evaluate patient data from remote patient monitoring devices in some cases. In fact, many locations were forced to close for the day (or multiple days) and cancel all appointments. This delayed diagnosis and treatment for many patients.  

The more recent June 2025 Google Cloud outage impacted some healthcare organizations that reportedly lost access to some of their diagnostic tools. While these globally impacting events are lightning rods for the healthcare industry, other hospital- or provider-specific disruptions that impacted different areas of the healthcare environment—including rescheduling of surgeries and medical visits, poor-quality telehealth sessions, and loss of electronic health record (EHR) access for 50 remote locations—have made headline news as well.

What these outage examples have in common is that healthcare organizations deal with disruptions regularly, and IT teams agree that it takes too long to identify the problems, pinpoint their source, and restore service. For remote medical offices and clinics, these slowdowns and disruptions can last even longer, because these locations lack IT professionals locally to help troubleshoot issues in the emerging stages when users are first noticing the problem. One of the actionable steps healthcare organizations can take to address this challenge and build business resiliency is to invest in observability.

Delivering quality patient care in remote clinics, urgent care centers, throughout sprawling medical buildings, and even in rural locations has been made possible with remote access to IT resources. Some of the services used in these locations may continue to be hosted in the healthcare’s private data center. However, more and more applications—including EHR, imaging, e-prescriptions, and telehealth services—are now offered as software as a service (SaaS) or have moved to the cloud for easier accessibility from anywhere. Additionally, many organizations leverage unified communications as a service (UCaaS) for teleconferencing services, instant messaging, and phone calls via cloud-hosted applications, including Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams.

Observability for Remote Medical Facilities

Observability is a strategic effort by many healthcare organizations worldwide, not only for their private data centers but also for their regionally distributed remote medical buildings, clinics, and urgent care facilities. Continuous monitoring at the remote business edge—where on-site IT resources for troubleshooting are limited—is essential. Centralized IT teams need end-to-end visibility as a proactive approach against potential disruptions and when problems do emerge. Identifying the root cause of performance issues depends on in-depth details to discern if it is a Wi-Fi issue in the remote location, a third-party WAN provider, an issue with a co-location vendor, or applications hosted in the public cloud. Wherever it may lie across the ecosystem, the more quickly centralized IT can identify an emerging problem and its source, the more quickly the healthcare staff can get back to delivering swift, safe patient treatment. With the number of locations and medical IoT devices in use, gaining valuable observability is more important than ever.

NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions for observability are specifically targeted at remote medical locations and will dramatically reduce mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to restore (MTTR) essential clinical applications and services to medical staff and patients in remote facilities as well as throughout hospital buildings. See the impact it had on one NETSCOUT customer as the organization added observability to successfully troubleshoot and resolve persistent problems in its distributed medical offices.

See the impact NETSCOUT’s nGenius solutions had on one NETSCOUT customer as the organization added observability to successfully troubleshoot and resolve persistent problems in its distributed medical offices.