Not too long ago, a relative was in the hospital getting ready for an outpatient procedure.  The nurse put the ID band on her and walked away.  Upon inspection of the ID band, my relative realized that this was the wrong band as it had another person’s name on it.  It was a good thing it was discovered quickly, otherwise she could have had an unnecessary and potentially dangerous procedure performed on her.  Where human life and information are concerned, there really is no room for error.  However, the big surprise is just how much patient data is still being kept on paper with no easy way to reconcile and maintain a single central up-to-date version. 

With the amount of data that is collected at doctor’s offices and hospitals, it is critical that the data be maintained up-to-date and available 24/7.  This data includes patient visit details, dates the patient was admitted, transferred or discharged, lab results, vital signs, radiology reports and medication.  Not only is the accuracy of the information important, but so is the speed in which information is delivered.  Time-sensitive information that is not transmitted immediately can elevate the risk factors for patients.  Having a program that performs accurately and without interruption is absolutely crucial to the healthcare IT environment.

Many health providers are in process of converting their paper records to electronic medical records (EMR).  In order to consolidate them they often use tools such as WebSphere MQ as a “pipe” to push all their records down and move them from the many provider locations to a single consistent version of “truth”.

A healthcare IT environment definitely cannot afford downtime, slowdowns and continual tinkering when lives are at stake.  Can you imagine, being in a critical state and being told, “Sorry, our computer is running a little slow.  Hopefully, we will get the information we need in time.”  It is important to have a secure, stable, affordable, easy to work with monitoring product in place to avoid such possibly catastrophic situations. Monitoring both the consolidation of patient data and its availability to practitioners is more than mission-critical, it is health-critical.

To learn more about an application performance monitoring solution that ensures the availability and performance of your medical data processing via auto discovery, real-time monitoring and analytics via complex event processing, take a look at this case study.