How to Monitor the Health of your Applications

Between the meteoric rise of telehealth visits (which has seen a whopping 3,800 percent increase since COVID-19), the ever-increasing healthcare tech stack, and the up-and-coming wave of Medtech pushing the boundaries of patient and healthcare experiences, one thing is clear: healthcare is grappling with digital technology. There's an ever-so-tempting $3 trillion in cost savings on the horizon. But to ride that digital wave to success, you need to avoid wipeouts.

So how do you do it? Is there a way to wrestle those digital demons without sacrificing agility, reliability, and patient satisfaction? And how can you possibly adopt the awesome technologies on the horizon (like many of those discussed at this year's Health Institute Summit) if you're struggling to keep up with your existing tech stack?

Don't worry; there's a way out.

The Digital Patient Experience, Interoperability, & Digital Readiness: A Collision Forces

As a healthcare company, you're dealing with enormous digital pressure. Apps, browser-based tools, virtual desktops, cloud environments, and hybrid ecosystems all command your attention with promising point solutions and impressive health tech. Regulatory agencies are scrutinising digital performance and ushering in complex new tech requirements. And small blips of IT downtime can result in significant damages — both to you and your patients. Worse yet, the fantastic new healthcare technologies that promise improved productivity, transparency, and operability can do the exact opposite in the face of ever-increasing tech infrastructures.

Here's where things go from bad to worse. You can't simply focus on solving the technical issues surrounding tech adoption. Yes. You need to monitor your apps, discover glitches, outages, and other issues, and mitigate them successfully as they occur in production.

As McKinsey puts it, healthcare systems need to think: "patient pathway back" not "product forward." The success of your digital efforts (we're talking about everything from simple healthcare apps to complex and sprawling cloud, hybrid, and DaaS systems) is hinged on the patient experience. In fact, the #1 reason healthcare systems adopt technology in the first place isn't to remain competitive, retain customers, or reduce expense (though these are all important.) It's to improve patient outcomes and well-being. Your patients expect amazing, connective, and transformative digital experiences. Medtech, apps, employee point solutions, cloud environments, and virtual desktops are all tools you use to meet young, digitally-native patients on familiar grounds, automate and synchronise core processes, and discover new avenues of opportunities for physicians, patients, and staff.

So, we have an issue. On the one hand, healthcare systems need to adopt new, exciting, and groundbreaking technologies to meet patient demands (90 percent of them expect integrated tech ecosystems) and remain financially secure. On the other hand, your digital ecosystem has never been more complicated, and a few small network issues or an SSL certificate expiring can result in serious monetary or reputational damage. How do you adapt? Better yet, how do you open all of these wonderful new digital ecosystems without letting pesky outages escape to roam the hallways of your IT architecture?

Simple: you need a digital hall monitor.

What is "Agentless" Monitoring?

At its most basic, application monitoring can rely on actual users encountering problems that have occurred in the system (for example, the network team incorrectly removing a firewall rule).  Obviously, this is becoming intolerable in today's health tech landscape. Healthcare providers cannot afford that type of outage with their staff and patients’ interactions. You need around-the-clock coverage across every digital tool — regardless of its origins, platform, or architecture.

Synthetic monitoring involves using "bots" or "scripts" to constantly test your health applications for functionality, user experience, and performance. Usually, this is only viable for a single app on a single platform. At 2 Steps, we go above-and-beyond synthetic monitoring. Our agentless monitoring solution was purpose-built to handle your modern and legacy technology challenges. You can run 2 Steps on any app, in any environment, without a single drop of coding knowledge. Better yet, you can automate the whole thing.

What does this mean for your healthcare business?

• Monitoring heaven: 24/7 end to end monitoring for any issues your users will encounter when they use your legacy and up-to-date applications.
• Hyper-visible feedback: We provide video feedback of any issue for your dev team (or vendors) plus instant connectivity to Splunk (that's data + visuals!)
• No-code monitoring: Anyone in your entire healthcare organization can use 2 Steps to monitor your applications.... seriously.
• Platform-agnostic testing: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, hybrid environments, browsers (e.g., Edge, Chrome, Firefox, etc.), mobile (e.g., iOS & Android), VDIs, DaaS, etc. You named it: we can monitor it.
• Stress-free adoption: You want that shiny new app? Get it! You know you'll have the tools at hand to monitor it.
• Flexible dev cycle: Want to build your own solutions. 2 Steps is a DevOps enabler. Plug us in early and watch the data flow.

How 2 Steps Can Help You Embrace the Awesome Technologies 

Healthtech has the power to fundamentally transform your business, energise your financials, and connect you with patients in new and profound ways. Unfortunately, tech can also be restrictive. Sprawling IT architectures spawned by these awesome systems can be challenging to track, control, and monitor across patient ecosystems.

At 2 Steps, we're changing the game. We're your one-stop end-user monitoring solution across any application. Learn how to achieve full end-to-end visibility across today’s service delivery chains with a synthetic monitoring tool that works with virtual desktop environments across multiple locations in the latest white paper from 2 Steps, download your copy here.

Ready to learn more? Contact us today. Let's make technology useable, fun, and ultimately rewarding.