IoT in Healthcare IT: Mega-Data Flowing

Everywhere Get Ready Now!

Xangati Blog
Atchison Frazer
Vice President, Marketing

March 25, 2015

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The Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly impacts the everyday lives of healthcare consumers and
providers alike, providing tremendous benefits across the whole medical ecosystem.
IDC believes IoT will become a big part of the next wave of technology in healthcare, and 3rdPlatform technologies (cloud, Big Data, mobile, and social media) will play a central role in this
transformation.
IDC also believes that the Internet of Things is fundamental to the future of healthcare. Sensors,
coupled with data analytics, cloud, and mobile technologies, provide an exciting if not challenging
opportunity to radically change our approach to disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

However, while healthcare providers believe IoT is emerging into the mainstream, most
professionals say they arent ready for the onslaught of data that inevitably comes with IoT.
IDCs Health Insights survey from its 2014 healthcare IT summit found that while 23% of
professionals think IoT will become mainstream by 2018-19, almost 29% said they are not prepared
to handle the data implications of IoT.

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Why is IoT in healthcare perceived as such a threat to operational readiness? Here is a very simple
answer to a very complex scenario: data. The data implications of IoT in healthcare are
unprecedented: newer, larger sets of data; more granular data; data that are faster to access and
cheaper to collect. In exchange, the hope is that the data onslaught from IoT will result in improved,
more prudent decision-making while delivering more proactive and less reactive intelligent
operations.
Making sense of all that IoT data and automating a standards-based system of capturing,
monitoring, collecting and collating IoT healthcare data is a whole different challenge.

Without an automated means of converting raw IoT data into information, collecting more healthcare
data in higher volumes does not necessarily translate to supporting positive action or decisionmaking. In fact, IoT data still suffer from general data concerns around trusted sources, secure
access and privacy, ease of understanding, high or low quality of data, timeliness versus
retrospective data, and whether the data present a complete picture with enough granularity to be
useful.

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An effective IoT solution for healthcare ideally must have end-to-end operationally mature elements
in place to take advantage of richer data availability including robust, holistic capture capabilities,
multi-mode transmission and integration, and not least, medical-grade software dashboards for data
visualization and decision-analysis calculations on-demand.
IDCs vision of IoT in healthcare starts with the patient-consumer in terms of the first collection point
for IoT data, including the individuals personal area network or most immediate addressable
spectrum and then as a subset, the persons body area network, i.e., sensors or devices
implanted, embedded or wearable that chronicle all sorts of biometrics. The mode of transmission to
an aggregation point would include the Bluetooth, cellular, Wi-Fi and ZigBee protocols.
The data aggregation points, ranging from mobile apps and devices to web portals to gateway
appliances, or even on-premise medical-cloud servers, would transmit all of that patient-consumer
data to a backend system hosting a range of services such as EMR, care management and
population health.

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The central nervous system of the IoT healthcare architecture is a very powerful analysis engine that
typically is running inside a hypervisor (virtualized infrastructure) or even a hybrid-cloud
environment. Some healthcare entities have special data processing requirements, especially in life
sciences discovery and genetic biotech development, whereby jumbo frames of data and graphicsintensive applications for modeling potentially bog everything else down, but that also tend to be
very latency prone and susceptible to IOPS storage degradation.
These potential bottlenecks in the IoT healthcare environment can become especially acute when
remote monitoring or event telepresence HD video-medicine are introduced into the environment.
Public safety, emergency care mobility and first responders are obvious use cases for layered IoT
data stacks.
Poor performance in serving these medical applications can significantly impact end-user
experience and end-customer serviceability due to slow application responsiveness, fleeting
intermittent application jitters, and unidentifiable resource contentions. With respect to compliance,
VI monitoring tools are required to ensure network compliance auditing and real time alerting of
anomalies, including network traffic, user access, change management activities, and system errors,
as well as east-west traffic (such as VM-to-VM interactions).

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To accommodate existing data processing and integration demands, some organizations cant avoid
the temptation to over-provision network connectivity, Internet bandwidth or storage arrays, while
others choose to deploy an intelligent data fabric to monitor all functional components of the
virtualized infrastructure.
For example, over a period of several months, a mid-size medical institution added several new
remote facilities. Their EMR system was extremely latency-sensitive, so the typical approach was to
purchase extra metro-Ethernet connections to these sites. In the past, they monitored these links
with conventional tools so they could see when utilization on the metro circuit reached a point that
would cause issues for their own end-users.
This medical organization began terminating the metro connections to the remote new sites with
NetFlow-capable firewalls, which with the right performance management system provides the flow
analysis needed to monitor the link itself or the entire remote site in real-time at a per-session basis.
Now, when they see utilization on one of these links spike, they can look at the VI performance
dashboard and find out immediately who and/or what are causing the issue.
This is good model to follow to before IoT in healthcare becomes mainstream.

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