Using better network insight to boost productivity in Australian health care

As hospitals and healthcare organisations across Australia undergo rapid digital transformation, services such as telehealth appointments, bedside monitoring, diagnostic imaging, Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices and cloud-hosted clinical systems are all increasing demand on networks that were never designed to be the clinical backbone of 21st-century care. The shift to digitally supported care delivers huge benefits in access and outcomes, but it also makes network reliability, rapid troubleshooting and forensic clarity essential productivity enablers for clinicians and IT teams alike.

The missing piece for many hospitals and healthcare providers is not another tool, but better visibility: guaranteed, packet-level insight into how clinical devices, applications and users actually communicate. When IT teams can see every packet that traverses the clinical network without risking downtime or interfering with latency-sensitive devices, they can fix outages faster, reduce clinical interruptions, optimise capacity, and support safer, more efficient delivery of care.

Why network visibility matters in Australian health care

Most healthcare leaders instinctively link network visibility with cybersecurity. That’s valid. But packet-level visibility delivers productivity wins long before it’s ever needed for an incident response through means such as:

• Faster fault isolation — when a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) or electronic health record (EHR) session fails, packet captures show whether the issue is network congestion, a misconfigured switch, storage latency or an application error — cutting mean-time-to-repair from hours to minutes.
• Reduced clinical downtime — downtime of imaging suites, infusion controllers or bedside monitors has immediate patient-flow and safety consequences. Visibility helps to proactively verify device health and connection integrity.
• Better capacity planning — full visibility reveals actual traffic patterns (not inferred ones) so IT architects can more accurately right-size wide area network (WAN) links, quality of service (QoS) policies and vertical local area network (VLAN) segmentation to prioritise critical clinical flows.
• Optimised telehealth and remote care — as demand for telehealth and remote care continues to grow, high-quality video and real-time monitoring require deterministic network behaviour. Packet telemetry helps fine-tune QoS and identify jitter/latency contributors.
• Operational assurance for legacy devices — many medical devices operate on legacy or proprietary protocols. Passive packet capture provides forensic context without requiring vendor updates or device reconfiguration.
   

In this way, visibility turns guesswork into data-driven action, which directly improves clinician time-on-task and reduces the hidden productivity tax of repeated, avoidable outages.

What visibility looks like in hospital networks

A practical visibility architecture is composed of three core elements:

1. Passive TAPs (test access points) mirror traffic at key network demarcations without adding latency or single points of failure, which is vital when monitoring life-critical devices.
2. Network packet brokers consolidate and filter traffic from multiple TAPs so monitoring tools receive only the telemetry they need, which prevents tool overload and lowers storage costs.
3. Hardware data diodes enable seamless data flow by adding an additional layer of security that prevents unwanted packet injection back into the network, which helps to reduce the risk and impact of a data breach.

This architecture preserves the stability of clinical devices while delivering the granular context that modern monitoring and analytics systems require.

Practical implementation for Australian health organisations

Australian hospitals and healthcare organisations can achieve tangible value quickly by instrumenting high-leverage points rather than attempting a system-wide rip-and-replace. The best and most practical approach is to:

• Start at aggregation points — feed traffic from core routers, data centre uplinks and PACS storage links into the visibility fabric first. These vantage points cover most traffic types and deliver rapid wins for imaging and EHR availability.
• TAP critical device demarcations — place passive TAPs at key network segments, firewalls, main sites and secondary locations so diagnostics tools receive the most critical data.
• Augment tools with packet brokers — use filtering, deduplication and timestamping to make sure analytics tools receive clean, usable inputs and that packet stores are efficient.
• Iterate on brownfield sites — deploy incrementally: validate baselines, tune alerts and expand coverage to smaller wards and remote clinics with proven procedures.

Metrics that show value to healthcare executives

To translate visibility into board-level return on investment, track the following productivity-related KPIs:

• Mean time to detect/repair for clinical application outages
• Device uptime for critical imaging and monitoring equipment
• Percentage of incidents resolved without vendor escalation
• Telehealth success rate based on the percentage of sessions meeting target QoS thresholds
• Time to retrieve forensic evidence — important for clinical governance and legal audits
   

Improvements on any of these metrics free clinician time, reduce elective and emergency delays, and lower the operational cost of supporting aging clinical stacks.

For health services, network visibility is a lever that multiplies the value of digital investments. It reduces wasted clinician time, shrinks repair windows, improves telehealth reliability and supports the clinical governance essential in regulated environments. Hospitals and health services that design visibility in from the start using non-disruptive, packet-level approaches will achieve faster returns from their digital transformation while strengthening both operational resilience and patient care.

*Michael Fisher is Regional Vice President Asia Pacific and Japan at Garland Technology.

Top image credit: iStock.com/izusek