SD-Wan - Leading A Wave Of Network Innovation For Healthcare Organizations

Kaiser Permanente’s journey into Software Defined-Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) started a few years ago to further improve our network resiliency and availability.

- Kristan Kline

With eight regions across the country that cover 12.2 million members, 689 medical offices, 39 hospitals, and several modes of remote care delivery, a-well-connected network is vital to our enterprise. If the WAN were to be degraded or go down, our clinical workflows would be negatively impacted. We would not be able to access electronic medical records (EMRs), pharmacy orders, and a multitude of other critical applications. At many of our facilities, especially inrural areas, there may only bea single network provider’s central office, wiring center, or physical network entry into our buildings. Even though we utilized dual circuits in those facilities, failures at any of the single points would have taken both circuits down and imposed a negative effect on the site’s care delivery capability. Trying to use traditional routers with diverse transport types (e.g. MPLS, Internet, cellular) on the same equipment is very complicated and not scalable. We had to find a better way.