From Outage to Oversight: Why Healthcare Network Observability Is Critical for Ensuring Patient Care and Compliance

In recent years, healthcare delivery and operations have continued to become ever-more digitized. As we move through the early part of 2026, the network has come to underpin an ever-increasing array of critical healthcare services. Today, a slow network doesn’t represent a nuisance—it poses a risk to the delivery of patient services and clinical experience.

Consequently, the industry is hitting a critical inflection point. Recent SEC Item 8.01 disclosures from major healthcare providers show a clear shift: Organizations are now reporting material events not only for security incidents, but for operational outages that have an impact on critical services.

Recent examples include a national pharmacy chain documenting instability in its prescription‑processing systems and a large dialysis network reporting multi‑million‑dollar remediation efforts tied to third‑party service failures. Review the details of these disclosures and the pattern is unmistakable: Network and IT teams were contending with a lack of visibility that left their organizations exposed to damaging operational issues.

The lesson is clear: Without true end‑to‑end network observability, teams in healthcare organizations can’t ensure clinical continuity or meet compliance expectations. If you can’t see the network, you can’t ensure uninterrupted delivery of healthcare services.

How the visibility gap becomes a risk to connectivity and compliance

The modern healthcare ecosystem has outgrown legacy monitoring. Clinical workflows now traverse a fragmented chain of private data centers, multi‑cloud environments, and ISP-managed segments—areas traditional tools don’t cover.

For network and IT operations leaders in healthcare, this new normal presents three critical challenges:

1. Third-party blind spots. A growing share of outages originate in SaaS, cloud, and vendor‑managed networks, yet the healthcare provider remains accountable for clinical uptime, and patient outcomes.

2. EHR and imaging latency. When an Epic login jumps from three seconds to thirty, or a 2GB radiology file crawls across a public link, throughput stalls and downstream care teams are immediately affected.

3. Regulatory compliance. SEC transparency guidance allows teams to prove—via routine monitoring—that an incident did not compromise patient safety. To comply with the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), teams must have end‑to‑end log visibility and verifiable evidence to prove that protected health information (PHI) remained available and uncompromised.

What are the three essential practices for network operations in modern healthcare environments?

To overcome the challenges outlined above, network and IT teams in healthcare organizations must evolve beyond legacy monitoring and adopt three essential practices:

1. Shift from device-centric to path-centric visibility. Traditional “up/down” polling of switches and routers is insufficient when clinical apps run in the cloud and users sit in remote clinics. Teams need full path visibility across private networks, ISP segments, and the public internet to ensure uninterrupted service delivery.

2. Prioritize "point-of-care" user experience. Infrastructure metrics alone don’t reflect clinical performance. The true measure is the clinician’s experience. If a provider can’t retrieve a chart or launch an Epic workflow within seconds, the network is effectively down—regardless of how many devices are showing “healthy” status.

3. Harness AI-driven predictive intelligence. In a regulated environment, reacting after outages have occurred is acting too late. AI-driven NetOps and algorithmic baselining is essential to detect early network anomalies—subtle latency shifts, packet‑loss patterns, or jitter spikes—that signal an impending outage, enabling remediation before patient care is disrupted.

How AppNeta powers the shift from blame games to care resilience

AppNeta by Broadcom transforms healthcare network operations by enabling teams to shift from reactive, “fire‑drill” troubleshooting to a proactive, path‑centric resilience model. By monitoring performance from the clinician’s point of care, AppNeta closes the visibility gaps that legacy tools can’t address.

How AppNeta ensures clinical continuity and consistent patient experience

Unlike traditional tools that rely on simple "up/down" polling, AppNeta uses deep technical telemetry and path analytics to ensure high‑performance delivery of critical clinical services. With the solution, teams can leverage these capabilities:

• Continuous synthetic EHR validation. Lightweight Monitoring Points deployed at nursing stations or remote clinics simulate real clinician workflows—such as Epic logins, chart retrievals, and patient searches. This provides 24/7 validation of EHR performance.

• Hop-by-hop path insight. AppNeta pinpoints the exact error domain across the full delivery chain. It can differentiate between such issues as local Wi‑Fi congestion, an ISP mid‑mile routing fault, or latency introduced within a SaaS application stack.

• Algorithmic anomaly detection. With the solution, teams can establish a baseline of normal performance and leverage AI-driven insights to flag unusual traffic spikes or packet loss before they escalate into an outage that affects patient services.

Read a prior blog post to learn more about the difference between network visibility and true network observability.

Real‑world evidence: How to optimize EHR and telehealth

How can network observability improve clinical continuity and patient care? Here are two examples of how healthcare organizations harnessed these capabilities to establish rapid, evidence‑driven performance issue resolution:

• Managed EHR services. With AppNeta, a large northwestern healthcare provider correlated user experience with infrastructure telemetry across 250 remote clinics. This enabled teams to track actual available capacity, optimize ISP performance, and eliminate imaging bottlenecks.

• Telehealth optimization. Teams in a not‑for‑profit healthcare system gained end‑to‑end visibility across hybrid, ISP, and cloud networks. As a result, they were able to speed issue detection, eliminate finger pointing, and enhance the telehealth experiences of providers and patients.

Why recovery in minutes—not hours—is critical

There is a significant gap between standard monitoring and AppNeta‑enabled observability. The operational benefits and cost savings of AppNeta can be enormous. Consider the resolution timeline for a typical EHR slowdown:

Ready to deliver uninterrupted clinical care?

Don’t let a “black box” network—whether it’s an ISP segment, a cloud provider’s environment, or a virtualized fabric—jeopardize your patient outcomes. Learn how AppNeta enables you to correlate user experience with deep infrastructure telemetry, so you can eliminate visibility gaps and keep critical care connected.

Frequently asked questions

What is SEC Item 8.01 and how can network observability support regulatory compliance in healthcare?

SEC Item 8.01 functions as a voluntary “catch‑all” disclosure for events investors should be aware of. Healthcare organizations now use it to report operational disruptions—EHR outages, pharmacy system instability, and other service degradations—without triggering the legal threshold of a material breach under Item 1.05. Network observability provides end‑to‑end visibility across every hop of the delivery path, supplying the real‑time telemetry and historical evidence needed to show that patient services were maintained and clinical data flows retained their integrity. This intelligence helps organizations align with transparency guidance while maintaining continuity of clinical care.

How does hybrid cloud change “network uptime” in healthcare?

In hybrid cloud environments, a portion of the network path can be up and functioning optimally, while a clinical service is unusable. Often, this can be due to latency in various externally managed segments, including SaaS, cloud, and ISP environments. Traditional device-centric uptime metrics no longer reflect whether clinicians can actually launch workflows or retrieve images. Modern network observability reframes uptime around service levels experienced by users. This ensures that if essential applications don’t respond quickly, the network is treated as effectively down for patient care—even when infrastructure metrics appear to be healthy.

Why do healthcare teams need path‑based network visibility, not just flow-level telemetry?

Standard flow data only shows what happens inside your data center and stops at the network edge. For healthcare systems with remote clinics and telehealth users, performance issues often occur in the ISP‑controlled middle mile. Path‑based network visibility maps the full journey of a clinical transaction across the internet, giving network and IT teams the evidence to hold external providers accountable and quickly pinpoint whether a slowdown is local or caused by an upstream routing issue.