Medical Capital Equipment Support Costs and the Reluctance by IT Departments to provide VPN access to medical device companies is a reality in 2018.
Integra Systems, Inc. © www.integrasystems.org
The Services Market Requirement Today
• Many medical devices and capital equipment providers today are now
network connected and often have applications servers as a part of their
solution. They may or may not be connected to the hospital network.
These application servers require software updates and often the devices
themselves have a needed real time requirement of
diagnostic monitoring as a part of a contract.
How is Remote Medical Device Service being conducted today?
• The remote services environment for the medical device, application
support and equipment support really consists of two options today. The
company supplying the equipment application, or device either sets up a
hospital IT approved VPN or you fly service people to the site. Companies may have local
service people as an option. Both options require a person roll. However
at the end of day these are really the only current available service
options.
Challenges of the Current Remote Services Model
• Many challenges exist with the current remote services model. The first
challenge is getting a legal agreement in place. Obtaining a VPN approval
from the healthcare IT organization for the medical device company is not
an easy task. The time to get this contract documentation could be from three
to almost nine months, yet alone the overall administrative cost. Also,
there is more than likely push back from the IT organization which is occurring more and more today because of security concerns. Meanwhile to
support the overall service of the medical device the company is bleeding
service dollars because service engineers need to be sent to the site. It is
estimated that the overall support costs on site for any type of software or
application upgrade; could approach a $12,000 cost. This is a real hit to
service contracts, plus this is ongoing and not able to be controlled.
The New Opportunity - A Swiss Army Knife of Technology
• How do you approach this with an opportunity in a drastic fashion that will
lower service costs, while improving real time service contract response?
You can now combine for the first time network access, multi-mode
wireless, security, a 4G-cloud switch, and a software defined network.
The Proposed New Integra Systems Services Turn Key Technology Solution
• This solution provides the opportunity to negate the need for a hospital IT approved VPN, while there is a limited or
no need to send a service person on site. The real question is, how can
you make this happen in a reliable fashion? A VPN (virtual private
network), extends a private network across a public network, and enables
users to send and receive data across shared or public networks. VPNs
cannot make online connections completely anonymous, but they can
usually increase privacy and security. To prevent disclosure of private
information, VPNs typically allow only authenticated remote access using
tunneling protocols and encryption techniques. A VPN is not secure.
What does the Integra Systems provided solution technically look like?
• With the no requirement for a hospital approved VPN, there is no exposure to public IP
address schemes. There is no change to the network hospital network
infrastructure as there is no interface to the hospital network. On the
security side, encrypted 256 bit AES data is sent via a private IP address
space. Multi-layer authentication architecture is provided via the device, a
virtual network, the domain and a Auto PKI (X.509 CA) trusted certificate
of authentication is additionally provided. Fully redundant architecture is architected that
is self-healing and self-optimizing that runs on top tier cloud providers on a
global perspective. One pane of glass could provide nationwide or global a
real time GPS view of all current status or software downloads.
The Financial Return on the Investment
• With the low cost of the technology, dramatic reductions in 4G costs, the
ROI is significant. The first “person” roll; will literally pay for the
technology. Projected ROI models have been built that show $100s of
thousands in yearly savings with $ millions over a five year period.
Proactive monitoring of equipment could also determine when the person
goes on site that he or she has the right equipment for service, versus a
reactive services model today.
See the attached TrapEx Case Study Discussing the Challenges of CyberSecurity of IOT Medical Devices
