ControlUp + IGEL for Healthcare IT: Time is Everything

Visit ControlUp in the IGEL Ready Partner Pavilion at HIMSS 2021 to see how ControlUp and IGEL are revolutionizing the way healthcare IT delivers the best possible digital employee experience. 

::defibrillator:: (squeal-charrrrrrrrrrrrge-bzzzap)

::heartbeat:: (thump THUMP… thump THUMP… thump THUMP)

A defibrillator is a life-saving device. Its job is to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm during cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is often fatal if appropriate steps aren’t taken immediately, so it’s imperative to act fast. 

ControlUp is like a defibrillator for your IT infrastructure. Similar to the way a defibrillator monitors the heart for arrhythmias, ControlUp monitors the ”pulse” of the resources in your infrastructure. And just like how a defibrillator can take corrective action to restart a heart, ControlUp gives you the ability to take corrective action on your resources. 

But there’s an additional—and vitally important—element that ControlUp and a defibrillator have in common: time. 

A defibrillator would be useless if you had to wait 15 minutes before you could hear a heartbeat or if you had to wait minutes after applying a shock to see how the heart responded. Taking action and seeing the effects in real-time is critical. 

ControlUp’s real-time monitoring gives Healthcare IT the ability to experience the “heartbeat” of your environment. When something goes wrong and the pulse of your resources changes, ControlUp allows you to take an action and immediately see its effect. 

To make things even faster, ControlUp makes it possible for you to automate the action. For example, if a process goes into an infinite loop and becomes non-responsive, ControlUp can send an alert to an administrator. The admin can then take an action to rectify the problem. The administrator can reduce the CPU consumption on that process to see if it will come out of its loop while reducing the impact of the process on other users on the same server. Alternatively, the administrator can choose to terminate and then relaunch the process in the user’s session, quickly getting them back into the application without the lengthy process of having to end the session and making them start over. 

Where ControlUp differs from a defibrillator is that an Administrator can set up automated actions that correct problems as they occur without the need for human intervention. This reduces the number of support calls, saving clinicians precious time and allowing technical staff to focus on more beneficial work.

Healthcare is one of the most rapidly changing and innovative industries in the world. Before the pandemic, telehealth was already on the cusp of widespread adoption, but with the sudden need for patients to be seen remotely, telehealth grew from x% to x%. This put significant strain on IT teams and physicians, but—more importantly—it made things enormously difficult for patients. 

You can’t provide high-quality patient care if the connection for the video call keeps dropping or works poorly. Similarly, if the EHR or other critical apps are down or degraded, the video may work fine, but the doctor can’t retrieve important patient data or update a patient’s chart. The ability to observe, analyze, and take action in real time is crucial for delivering the best remote patient care possible, and that is ControlUp’s speciality.

With ControlUp Ultimate, our healthcare customers get a suite of products that cover a wide array of capabilities. 

Scoutbees—ControlUp’s Proactive Synthetic Monitoring application—proactively monitors your most critical resources and services. You can continuously test your EHR and other important applications, alerting on any unexpected downtime events or performance changes. You proactively test the availability and performance of resources and services running internally—or even externally—within your network. If you have public-facing services, such as your organization’s website, a patient portal, or telehealth site, Scoutbees will alert you of service disruptions or degradation as they happen, as well as report on the historical performance data and availability.

ControlUp Edge DX—which allows IT to manage the digital employee experience for end-users using physical endpoints—is a boon for ensuring a great user experience for your full-time remote or hybrid workforce. It’s no good if your telehealth service is plagued with connection drops or is laggy; ControlUp can help you observe your workers’ key performance indicators in real time. We also provide guided troubleshooting, as well as fixes to quickly eradicate any issues. Whether it’s your payroll department, billing department, IT department or even remote clinical staff, having data from those important endpoints and the ability to run automated fixes plays an outsize role in ensuring a great user experience and positive patient outcomes.

The ControlUp RemoteDX plugin also provides value, not only for your remote workforce, but also within your healthcare facilities. Network disconnects and general network performance tend to be the chief complaints from staff working in hospitals. They roam throughout the campus, which can make providing optimal support a challenge. With Remote DX, you can easily discover issues like a troublesome access point, an area of the campus with poor Wi-Fi, and more.

Whether it’s your workforce in the office, clinics, hospitals, at home or working out in the community, ControlUp is the ideal solution to support all of your people and provide an ideal digital employee experience while enriching the work lives of your IT Admins. Join us at #HIMMS2021 to see how we facilitate a better experience for clinicians AND healthcare IT professionals.