Ranked as of the country’s biggest non-profit health care providers, Banner Health provides patient services in seven of the nation’s western states providing urgent care, home care, occupational health and hospice services. The company selected Plixer International’s (News - Alert) suite of NetFlow products to much more accurately pinpoint where network congestion is occurring.

What made Banner Health search for a network analysis tool in the first place? According to a case study, the company was busy increasing its footprint in three new locations including Alaska, Phoenix, and the Western United States when it quickly realized that its wide area network didn’t contain the crucial tools needed to pinpoint when its WAN connections were congested, or the source of its bandwidth consumption.

Extremely slow connection speeds were adversely affecting how fast patients received care across all of the company’s locations, as many applications including PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) images that are comprised of x-rays and other key information which can range from 10MB to 5GB, and Cerner and NextGen (News - Alert) which operate within Citrix-enabled devices need to work without interruption.

“Doctors need the PACS to be available on demand and do not have excess time to wait for downloads to complete,” says Jamie Eklund, network administrator for Banner Health in a statement. “We needed to find out what was causing the network congestion.”

To be able to rapidly understand what the cause of the network overflow was, Eklund turned to Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer to gain important information about the traffic on Banner Health’s network. Within the first week of operation, he used Scrutinizer to investigate a three hour backup that started after hours. “The backups were immediately rescheduled and the issue was quickly resolved,” says Eklund. “We cut a purchase order for Scrutinizer a week later.”

In addition, during a traffic investigation process, Eklund was able to closely look at VoIP traffic and saw a call that took up way too much time. “I emailed the report to our voice team and they determined the long call was a system error and manually removed the connection,” Eklund commented. “Any bandwidth we can recover with Scrutinizer means that we have more space for VoIP and our health care applications.”

Through using the Scrutinizer solution, Eklund gained full visibility into all aspects of his business including who spends the most time of the phone, applications, protocols, and much more.

At each location, Banner Health now has an IT person with their own log-in to Scrutinizer which allows them to look to see how an issue can be resolved on their own, enabling Eklund to stop addressing local bandwidth congestion issues, the study revealed.

It has now been over 4 successful years since Banner Health starting to utilize Scrutinizer and the company says that a large amount of network problems were completely eliminated and resolved rapidly due to Scrutinizer NetFlow.

To find out more about Plixer International, please visit their website here.