How to optimise Medical Imaging over SD-WAN
| SD-WAN optimises medical imaging by improving network performance, enabling fast, secure sharing of MRI, CT, and X-ray data, enhancing diagnostics, patient care and regulatory compliance for healthcare providers. |
High-resolution imaging technologies, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT) scans and X-Rays, have become essential to many facets of medical diagnostics and procedures. By allowing detailed anatomical visualisations, patients can receive timely diagnosis and treatment for a range of issues, going from minor injuries to life-threatening issues.
Given the potential range of uses for medical imaging, healthcare providers need to be able to share scans efficiently across facilities and departments. This not only allows consistency between departments but also ensures specialists can make more accurate diagnoses without requiring repeat scans.
Why optimise Medical Imaging?
When sharing medical imagery between departments, digital platforms enable healthcare providers to share medical images in seconds rather than days. This is essential as electronic medical image sharing reduces diagnosis and treatment time by up to 96% compared to traditional physical transfer methods, such as CDs. These traditional methods have issues with interoperability between medical operating systems and, within trauma cases, eliminating the use of CDs from the sharing process has resulted in wait times for life-saving operations decreasing by 25 minutes.
However, moving from CDs to entirely digital systems brings its own limitations. By sending high-quality imagery digitally, traditional network architectures typically struggle to cope with the bandwidth requirements and this can directly impact patient care and clinical efficiency. The increased volume of imaging data requires substantial network capacity, with even routine operations demanding high-performance connectivity for effective traffic flow. Simply expanding bandwidth isn't always the solution, as it increases long-term costs without addressing underlying infrastructure issues. As image quality improves or further new imaging technologies are introduced, bandwidth requirements will continue to increase, therefore bandwidth expansion merely pushes the issue down the line, rather than resolving it.
How does SD-WAN resolve bandwidth limitations for Medical Imaging?
An increased bandwidth requirement necessitates a new network architecture, with Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) solutions the ideal structure for sending such high-quality imagery. Offering improved networking and security services, SD-WAN implements dynamic traffic routing and Quality of Service (QoS) to load-balance traffic based on priority, ensuring optimal resource allocation for time-sensitive diagnostic data. As per SilverPeak, healthcare facilities can now process up to 650 gigabytes of image data daily with significantly improved efficiency. This is especially important for larger, distributed healthcare environments, as healthcare deployments typically manage more than 20 different operating systems, making data exchange and interpretation increasingly challenging. Further to this, network downtime in a medium-sized healthcare facility can result in approximately $300,000 in annual losses from imaging system outages alone.
The Role of Medical Imaging in Healthcare
Medical imaging is essential for human body diagnostic purposes within a healthcare environment. Not only is this true for initial assessments but also for gaining second opinions. Remote analysis through technologies such as teleradiology enable access for specialist expertise regardless of geographical location, with 88% of second opinions resulting in new or refined diagnoses.
How SD-WAN improves teleradiology and what are the regulatory requirements?
Remote radiology services have seen significant improvements when introduced alongside an SD-WAN network architecture. The scalability of the infrastructure means that installation of remote systems takes just 20 minutes in radiologists' homes, with remote maintenance capabilities able to resolve issues on the fly for remote users without the need for network administrators to physically attend.
When utilising teleradiology, healthcare providers should consider SD-WAN solutions that support the PCARE framework. PCARE enables secure access and sharing of prior imaging data while maintaining patient privacy and control.
When image sharing is compromised, patients face:
Delayed diagnoses
Increased radiation exposure from repeated X-ray scans
Extended wait times for specialist consultations
Higher risk of misdiagnosis
The ramifications of network issues on Medical Imaging
Whilst medical imaging is important for specialists to diagnose patients, diagnostic errors occur more frequently in emergency departments than the typical 10-15% rate seen in routine hospital care. To mitigate this, one of the more recent improvements to medical imaging is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for more rapidly and accurately diagnosing patients. One instance of how AI-powered systems have improved medical imaging and diagnosis, is that they can now classify brain tumours within minutes compared to traditional 40-minute workflows.
How SD-WAN Enhances Medical Image Transfer in Healthcare
Given the importance placed on medical imaging for diagnosing issues within the human body, healthcare providers must evaluate the potential ramifications of poor image transfer. Transfer issues mean that healthcare professionals experience delays when trying to access image, restricting specialist consultation capabilities and preventing treatment planning/initiation - which is a major issue for emergency response.
Typical mitigation methods such as unnecessary repeat imaging, extended patient stays and delayed treatments can be detrimental to patient health and increase the administrative burden for the provider. Due to this, healthcare providers should look to infrastructure changes, such as SD-WAN.
The difference between SD-WAN and traditional WAN approaches
SD-WAN combines multiple underlay links, including MPLS, broadband and cellular, to accommodate large imaging files while maintaining other healthcare-critical services, such as Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs). To achieve this, SD-WAN selects the lowest-latency path to transfer images, enabling faster diagnostic reviews for time-sensitive conditions like cardiac emergencies. By intelligently prioritising bandwidth for imaging traffic, SD-WAN can ensure seamless transfers of medical images, even during peak usage of the network for other services.
And with network security a particular concern, healthcare providers can rest assured that medical image transfers are encrypted by SD-WAN, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations - HIPAA (US), PIPEDA (Canada) and GDPR (UK/Europe). To back this up, the segmentation and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) capabilities of SD-WAN (and Secure Access Service Edge) isolates imaging traffic from other hospital systems. This prevents lateral movement from other systems, not only protecting images from breaches but also the wider scope of healthcare provider's digital assets, ensuring their confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Other important features of SD-WAN include dual access active/active connectivity, which ensures uninterrupted access to imaging services by providing redundancy, which is critical for consistent patient care across facilities. Further to this, SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge solutions that offer support for edge computing processes means that healthcare providers can process medical images nearer to clinical sites, rather than sending them to a centralised data hub, minimising delays and enhancing radiologists' efficiency in diagnostics and treatment planning.
Integration with Other Healthcare Systems
SD-WAN's use case within a healthcare environment isn't only limited to medical imaging though. Considering a wider scope, SD-WAN implements application-level controls to prioritise many healthcare technologies dependent on the providers targets or dynamically changing demands from patients. Whilst traditional network architectures would often need network administrators to manually configure prioritisations as and when demands changed, SD-WAN's Quality of Service (QoS) and load balancing capabilities automatically handle these aspects. For the most common healthcare technologies, Electronic Health Records and Picture Archiving and Communication systems (PACs), SD-WAN helps with ensuring optimal resource allocation.
Secure Access Service Edge & Zero Trust Network Access
The introduction of SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), a cloud-native architecture, offers capabilities such as Zero Trust Network Access that can be utilised to prevent lateral movement between healthcare systems, boosting overall network security. ZTNA always verifies the user and device identity through methods such as multi-factor authentication in order to ensure authenticity and compliance with security policies. By adding multi-factor authentication and network security measures to detect potentially malicious activities, ZTNA ensures the continuous performance of network operations and allows detailed image files to be sent across the network easily.
Cloud Access Security Broker & Secure Web Gateway
Further to secure network access, SASE and SD-WAN offer Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) as part of their security stacks, which enables leveraging public cloud services and the use of cloud-based healthcare systems. This means that healthcare providers can move away from traditional data centres, with cloud adoption providing secure access to cloud resources, such as more scalable EHRs and ensures the cloud security of sensitive data.
Within the unified platform, another security measure that secure access service edge adds is Secure Web Gateway (SWG), which is used to control web access via a remote device to protecting against web-based threats. This security technology prevents lateral movement and ensures secure connections to web systems, which when Secure Web Gateway is paired with Cloud Access Security Broker, allows for a wide range of healthcare software-as-a-service to be leveraged.
Use Cases of SD-WAN for Imaging Efficiency
One of the best ways that SD-WAN can be utilised for imaging efficiency is within large healthcare systems. These typically have a wide range of different systems that all require bandwidth and therefore have limited resources for imaging transfer systems to utilise. A good example of a large healthcare networks that utilised SD-WAN is MD Anderson Cancer Center. They introduced SD-WAN to share imaging data across more than 200 remote offices and the technology enabled secure transfer of high-resolution imaging data, with file sizes reaching hundreds of MB whilst still maintaining compliance with healthcare regulations.
SD-WAN offers the network architecture to enable rural healthcare delivery in several ways. Multiple underlay can be utilised simultaneously, replacing traditional dedicated links and increasing bandwidth availability. This therefore makes SD-WAN perfect for rural healthcare facilities, which can now efficiently transfer imaging data to urban centres nationwide.
To provide this improved network performance for medical image transfer, Healthcare facilities have achieved improved application performance and faster access to imaging files through application-aware traffic steering. Application-Aware Routing (AAR) switches traffic across the best performing network link in real time, therefore not only benefitting medical imaging but also the wider range of networked healthcare services.
Finally, the use of SD-WAN enables greater security capabilities, with intrusion prevention systems and data loss prevention, stopping cyber threats, such as exfiltration of medical data and scans. This improves overall data security for healthcare providers and creates trust with patients.
Implementation Challenges and Best Practices
There are multiple implementation challenges that can be experienced with large volumes of medical images. Whilst SD-WAN provides the infrastructure to use traffic steering capabilities, the network underlay still poses a major challenge. As SD-WAN can leverage links from multiple vendors, such as MPLS, broadband, 5G and private backbones, healthcare providers may assume that these all come bundled with any given solution. However, the Over-The-Top (OTT) nature of SD-WAN means that these underlays still have to be provisioned and therefore makes implementation of SD-WAN more difficult in regions where specific links are not available.
When medical images are thrown into the mix with electronic health records and real-time patient monitoring data, healthcare networks can quickly become congested and providers determine that they need faster and reliable transmission of sensitive data. This can be difficult across multiple location types (hospitals, clinics and remote care facilities), with each requiring capabilities to meet their own distinct network requirements.
For healthcare providers looking to transition to SD-WAN away from traditional WAN and virtual private networks (VPNs), legacy MPLS contracts often create inflexibility and underperformance issues in existing systems and new site setup can take days or months without proper implementation planning. Healthcare providers must carefully consider potential bottlenecks and utilise a phased rollout so that any issues do not have a widespread impact on the network.
One of the best ways for healthcare providers to do this is via SD-WAN's Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP). ZTP allows for remote deployment of new sites, reducing overall network deployment time and allowing new network edges to be brought online in minutes, rather than weeks.
Healthcare providers may be concerned about system downtime during any transition. Maintaining uninterrupted user access to critical healthcare applications can be a concern, therefore emphasising the importance of a phased rollout method.
A best practice that we'd strongly recommend is the training of IT and network administration teams on any chosen SD-WAN solution and the capabilities, automated processes, security functions and unified dashboards that it offers. SD-WAN is designed not only for network connectivity and its security capabilities but also for the way it simplifies management for network administrators and security teams that are controlling the network. By ensuring staff have the know-how, they can effectively monitor network performance and implement security policies to both benefit application and their data transfers, such as medical imagery. This is further enhanced by SASE, which as a cloud based platform, enables remote users to use cloud based management capabilities.
Future Trends in Medical Image Transfer with SD-WAN
With SD-WAN, healthcare providers can expect future improvements for medical imaging transfers, with the first of these being generative Artificial Intelligence.
Seemingly being used in every aspect of modern technology, by 2026 generative AI technology will be used for 20% of initial SD-WAN network configurations, up from nearly zero in 2023. The integration is expected to continue improvements for all network activities. Traffic pattern identification features benefit by utilising large data sets to help make optimised decision-making capabilities as to traffic importance and security issues. Alongside this, automated network adaptation enables the network to respond to changes in patient demands and healthcare professional behaviours, meanwhile predictive maintenance ensures that network configuration and underlay issues are detected before they can affect system/network performance.
By introducing Application-Aware Routing (AAR), SD-WAN can use traffic steering measures to facilitate increased scans such as magnetic resonance imaging per day, with secure and efficient transfer of high-resolution imaging data across a healthcare network.
The combination of 5G and SD-WAN technologies offer much higher transmission rates (than traditional WAN) for large medical files, allowing real-time transmission of high-definition clinical-grade images for a faster diagnosis process.
Conclusion
By moving away from a traditional WAN approach to SD-WAN, healthcare providers can optimise medical imaging by addressing the challenges associated with high-resolution image transfer. SD-WAN ensures faster, more reliable network performance through dynamic routing and application-aware traffic steering, enabling seamless sharing of MRI scans, CT images, and X-rays across facilities. By leveraging multiple links, SD-WAN improves connectivity, minimises latency and offers the ability to utilise the bandwidth required for not only imaging technologies, but a growing number of healthcare technologies.
In addition to its networking capabilities, SD-WAN integrates security features such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), protecting sensitive patient data and ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations. Cloud integration allows for scalable storage and access to medical images, while edge computing reduces delays in processing, further boosting diagnostic efficiency.
For healthcare organisations, SD-WAN represents an ideal solution that supports the growing demands of medical imaging while improving patient outcomes and operational efficiency. Its ability to combine networking and security functions into a unified, flexible infrastructure makes it an essential architecture for healthcare delivery. By adopting SD-WAN, providers can optimise image transfer processes, care processes and ensure that medical imaging is more timely and offers more accurate diagnostics.