Paessler AG announced the immediate availability of a network monitoring offering for the healthcare industry, including hospitals, physicians groups, radiological firms, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies and others.

Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor now features sensors designed for the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Health Level Seven International (HL7) protocols used throughout healthcare.

Using PRTG Network Monitor, organizations can monitor their entire information technology (IT) infrastructure and medical and clinical systems simultaneously with one solution, on one dashboard, in real-time.

PRTG makes it possible to continuously monitor the performance of networks, systems, hardware, applications and connected devices - on premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments that include physical and virtualized assets. With feeds from the more than 200 pre-configured sensors Paessler offers, PRTG’s highly customizable dashboards reveal in a glance the precise information that administrators want to see. This includes real-time intelligence on the performance and health of the network as a whole down to granular details such as the temperature and capacity levels of individual servers and devices.

When something goes awry, such as the failure of a fan in a server, or any pre-determined performance thresholds of the user’s choosing are met, PRTG alerts authorized users. Set up takes minutes and custom sensors, including those associated with the Internet of Things, can also be added with ease.

Johannes Liegert, Senior Developer at Paessler, said: “The move to value-based care and the data transfer it requires, the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR), and innovations occurring in disciplines like imaging have fundamentally changed the healthcare IT landscape. Having visibility over your traditional IT infrastructure is no longer enough. You must also be able to monitor the connected hardware and software used throughout clinical settings for everything from MRIs to appointment setting and billing. With PRTG, healthcare IT professionals can now work with a comprehensive view of everything that is happening at any given point in time across their entire connected healthcare IT ecosystem and be the first to know if a problem arises.”

The DICOM and HL7 Sensors in PRTG empower healthcare IT professionals and administrators to monitor a variety of critical systems and functions, including:

- Hospital Information Systems (HIS): PRTG makes it possible to see what is happening across the entire integrated HIS, not only as it relates to the exchange of data, but also the computing resources and devices involved. Notably, PRTG can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, and has purpose built sensors for many of the most widely used IT solutions in the industry, including those from Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Fujitsu, Microsoft, NetApp, VMware and others. With PRTG it has never been easier for hospital IT departments to monitor their medical, financial and administrative systems in their entirety.

- Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS): PRTG also makes it easy to oversee all of the systems and devices integrated with laboratory processes, as well as the data transported between them, including information related to specimen management, testing, analysis, disposal and compliance. Monitoring also ensures that physicians and clinical teams enjoy fast access to the findings they need.

- Radiological Information Systems (RIS): All of the systems, hardware and software within radiological and imaging departments and associated workflows can be monitored through PRTG’s intuitive dashboard - enabling IT to easily pinpoint the cause of any delay in the delivery of images between devices, departments or physicians.

- Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS): PRTG also monitors the entire PACS, making it possible to ensure that all of the systems required for the secure movement, storage and archiving of images function as they should. This includes workstations used to view and interpret scans.

“In today’s increasingly complex healthcare IT systems the failure of a single device, a minor glitch in software or even a simple human mistake can have significant repercussions on business operations and - most importantly - patient care,” added Liegert. “You have to see a problem before you can fix it. That’s why monitoring is crucial.”