The following is a guest article by Scott Pross, VP of Technology at Monalytic, a SolarWinds Company
The future of healthcare will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
AI can enhance the speed and accuracy of diagnosis, book appointments, support clinical trials, reduce costs and errors, and improve cybersecurity posture. AI can also address the shortage of skilled healthcare workers – particularly in the field of IT operation. Indeed, a study by the Health Management Academy found that 47.5% of health systems currently use AI solutions to address workforce challenges and improve productivity, with the rest considering AI for this purpose.
AI in IT operations – also known as AIOps – is a collection of tools, technologies, and processes that help healthcare organizations manage modern, complex IT environments, particularly hybrid operations that incorporate cloud and on-premises architectures.
AIOps makes it possible for IT teams to increase operational awareness, shift toward autonomous operations, improve performance, and free up manpower to grow, optimize, and secure the network.
Let’s look at four ways AIOps can help fulfill the potential of AI in healthcare:
Complete Visibility Into the IT Environment
Modern healthcare organizations have highly complicated technology stacks, encompassing networks, databases, applications, medical devices, connected sensors, and more.
Traditional monitoring tools can provide insights into parts of this infrastructure, but don’t scale to integrate or provide the level of insight that healthcare IT infrastructures require. For instance, they only provide alerts and insights into issues as they arise – when the user is already impacted and patient care may potentially be compromised.
This is where AIOps excels. Using the power of AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics, IT teams can collect data from across the ecosystem to increase operational awareness, reduce event noise, and eliminate costly tool sprawl. Essentially, AIOps reduces the paradox of having too much data, too little manpower, and not enough insights.
Importantly, AIOps-powered observability considers all application dependencies, thereby helping teams better understand how an anomaly or defect in one app could affect another.
Imagine the chain reaction that could occur within a hospital system resulting from a single failure in the network that connects medical devices, like heart rate monitors and IV pumps. AIOps gives teams the visibility they need to quickly identify the failure, understand dependencies, trace the issue’s impact across IT operations, accelerate root cause analysis, and rectify the problem.
Achieve Autonomous Operations
Healthcare was one of, if not the most, affected industries following the Covid-19 pandemic. One in five healthcare workers have quit since 2020. Staffing shortages are worsening skill gaps because it is now more difficult to find time to upskill or reskill. AIOps can help address this shortfall by helping organizations move toward autonomous operations.
AIOps is a proactive approach to digital services management. Advanced AIOps operate seamlessly in the background, continuously observing data movement and interactions between applications and devices. Vulnerabilities and performance bottlenecks are automatically detected and fixed. Moreover, this intelligent technology evolves over time, learning from the IT environment to the point where it can predict issues and automatically trigger mitigation workflows – without the need for IT’s involvement.
By doing so, AIOps ensures a more resilient, autonomous IT infrastructure while freeing IT pros to focus on business-critical activities, such as optimizing the infrastructure.
Discover Healthcare IT Security Deficiencies
Ensuring the security of patient data is essential, yet it’s complicated by the array of both legacy and emerging technologies, such as AI, that healthcare systems rely on. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, a substantial number of Americans express discomfort with the idea of AI being employed in their healthcare, with 37% believing the use of AI could worsen the security of patient records.
With cyber threats against healthcare organizations on the rise, healthcare leaders have heightened concerns about the security of patient data and the ability to identify data privacy deficiencies. With the threats continuing, these top concerns become the most important functions required of any hybrid IT management solution.
In this context, AIOps plays a crucial role. It can proactively and continuously seek out issues – in new and emerging technologies – before they are exploited by hackers and anticipate issues such as potential violations of HIPAA compliance.
Assist Executives in Making More Informed Decisions
AIOps plays a pivotal role in capacity planning and optimization. By leveraging historical data and predictive analysis, it can anticipate when capacity limits are nearing, allowing IT leaders to proactively strategize changes and upgrades. This ensures optimal service delivery and continuity of patient care.
AIOps-powered observability also provides healthcare executives with a single pane of glass view into the performance of the business services used every day, including patient records, portals, applications, and more. This heightened visibility empowers them to make more informed decisions about investments, resource allocation, and potential system workarounds.
AI Promises Simplified, Secure, and Compliant Healthcare IT
Ultimately, AI is set to be the driving force behind the future of healthcare. Its transformative impact will elevate efficiencies, care, and outcomes for hospitals, clinicians, and patients alike.
IT leaders and their teams can leverage the potent predictive intelligence of AIOps to navigate complex hybrid IT environments and effectively address pressing workforce and security challenges.
If used appropriately, the integration of AI in healthcare promises a future marked by simplified IT management, security, and compliance.
About Scott Pross
Scott Pross has been a user, customer, and SolarWinds engineer for the past 15 years. He originally learned the Orion Platform as an NOC manager, building out a 24/7 NOC for a billion-dollar company. Scott has worked on hundreds of SolarWinds environments ranging from large commercial organizations to classified government agencies. He currently works with SolarWinds customers to show them how to obtain the highest return on investment (ROI) from the Orion Platform.
