Providence Enhances Networking with Custom-Designed Telemetry Solutions

Health is pioneering a new approach to network reliability with a custom telemetry platform, ensuring seamless care delivery. Learn how real-time data insights are revolutionizing healthcare IT.">

Providence Health System Achieves Uninterrupted Care Through Advanced Network Telemetry

Seattle, WA – September 8, 2025 – Providence, a leading healthcare system, has unveiled a cutting-edge, internally developed telemetry monitoring platform designed to maintain consistently high-quality digital service delivery across its extensive network. The system captures, interprets, and responds to network and application issues in real-time, resulting in a data-driven approach to diagnosing impairments and improving uptime for critical clinical applications.

The Need for Proactive Monitoring

Kellie Larkin, Vice President of Identity, Networking, and Data Engineering at Providence, emphasized the foundational importance of network reliability.”Nothing functions effectively if the network is unavailable or users encounter login difficulties,” Larkin stated. “Our primary goal was to establish a heightened level of situational awareness, offering both our technical teams and clinical staff a real-time understanding of application impacts when performance issues arise.”

the healthcare industry faces unique demands, with patient care directly dependent on the seamless operation of digital systems. A recent report by HIMSS indicated that network outages cost hospitals an average of $8,200 per minute in lost revenue and potential risks to patient safety.

From MPLS to SD-WAN: Building a Resilient Foundation

The transformation began with a strategic shift away from a conventional, expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) infrastructure toward a more agile and cost-effective Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) design. Providence strategically combined regional carriers and private fiber links, creating a redundant network mesh to minimize latency across geographically diverse locations. This new infrastructure facilitated granular and dynamic routing between sites and cloud-based resources.

The architecture incorporates both public and private network pathways, with traffic encrypted and routed through the most performant path at any given time.This has yielded up to a 60% reduction in latency in certain areas, bolstering performance for both clinical personnel and administrative staff.

Telemetry: Translating Data into Clinical impact

Though, merely upgrading the infrastructure wasn’t enough. Providence recognized the need for enhanced visibility, investing heavily in telemetry to capture live data signals and correlate them with operational expectations. “We didn’t simply want to know when something failed; we needed to understand how the failure impacted the clinical experience,” larkin explained.

This required a telemetry system capable of correlating physical network data – including packet loss,jitter,and latency – with application responsiveness and user perception. The organization developed a unique user experience algorithm informed by years of ServiceNow ticket history, incident response patterns, and application metadata.

Quantifying Impairment and Prioritizing Care

The resulting real-time scoring system classifies performance as good, impaired, or non-functional, with these scores mapped to specific clinical impact levels. By treating “impairment” as a spectrum,Providence can now characterize issues with greater nuance.

For example, a minor slowdown in image rendering for a radiologist can be prioritized over a delay in loading an administrative portal, depending on the clinical context. Larkin emphasized, “Radiologists often speak in terms of milliseconds impacting brain or heart cell analysis during emergencies. Prompt image delivery is vital for care, so we collaborated with clinical leadership to establish performance benchmarks and built telemetry around those guidelines.”

Performance Level	Clinical Impact	response Priority
Good	No Impact	Routine Monitoring
Impaired	Potential for Minor Disruption	Investigate within 4 Hours
non-Functional	Critical Impact to Patient Care	Immediate Response

Mission Control and Proactive Support

A dedicated mission control team oversees the enterprise infrastructure and applications, utilizing custom dashboards to swiftly detect anomalies and assess potential impacts on clinicians. This team doesn’t just react to alerts; they analyze data, determine clinical impact, and respond accordingly.

Furthermore, Providence proactively shares telemetry data with its network carriers via direct API integrations. This openness enables faster resolution times and provides leverage for enforcing contract penalties when service levels are not met.

Did You Know? According to a recent survey by Gartner, organizations that proactively monitor their network performance experience 25% fewer critical outages.

Beyond Network Performance: Identity and Access Management

The telemetry platform extends beyond network monitoring to enhance identity modernization efforts. As Providence streamlines its application portfolio, role-based access control becomes increasingly crucial. The team leverages directory data,ancient provisioning details,and correlation analytics to model real-world role and access relationships.

Pro Tip: When implementing telemetry, focus on correlating technical data with tangible business outcomes to demonstrate value and drive adoption.

This data-driven approach strengthens regulatory compliance, improves cybersecurity, and reduces friction for caregivers.

The Future of Healthcare IT monitoring

The advancements made by Providence represent a growing trend in healthcare IT: the move towards proactive, data-driven monitoring. As healthcare systems become increasingly reliant on digital infrastructure, the ability to quickly identify and resolve network issues will be paramount to delivering quality patient care. expect to see wider adoption of similar telemetry platforms and a greater emphasis on integrating network monitoring with clinical workflows.

What challenges does your organization face in maintaining network reliability? How can data analytics be better leveraged to improve patient outcomes?

Frequently Asked Questions about Network Telemetry

• What is network telemetry? Network telemetry is the process of collecting data about network performance, such as latency, packet loss, and jitter, to gain insights into its health and identify potential issues.
• why is telemetry crucial in healthcare? Telemetry is critical in healthcare as network outages and performance issues can directly impact patient care.
• How does Providence use telemetry to improve clinical care? Providence uses telemetry to correlate network performance data with clinical workflows,allowing them to prioritize issues based on their impact on patient outcomes.
• What is SD-WAN and how does it help? SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is a technology that allows for more flexible and efficient network management, improving performance and reducing costs.
• What are the key benefits of a proactive telemetry approach? A proactive approach to telemetry allows organizations to identify and resolve issues before they impact users, minimizing downtime and improving overall reliability.
• How can othre healthcare organizations implement similar systems? Start with a clear understanding of your critical applications and workflows, then invest in telemetry tools that can provide actionable insights.
• What role does data analytics play in healthcare network monitoring? Data analytics is essential for making sense of the vast amount of telemetry data collected, enabling organizations to identify patterns, predict potential problems, and optimize network performance.

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What specific metrics does Providence prioritize when identifying critical data points for custom telemetry solutions?

Understanding the Power of Network Telemetry

Network telemetry is the automated collection of data emitted by network devices. This data provides deep visibility into network performance, security, and user experience. Unlike conventional monitoring methods that rely on polling, telemetry pushes data in real-time, offering a more accurate and granular view of network behavior. Providence leverages this power to deliver superior networking solutions. Key terms related to this include network performance monitoring, data analytics, and real-time network visibility.

Custom Telemetry Solutions: A Tailored Approach

Providence doesn’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. We specialize in designing and implementing custom telemetry solutions tailored to the unique needs of each client. This involves:

Identifying Critical Data Points: Working with clients to pinpoint the specific metrics that matter most to their business – latency, packet loss, bandwidth utilization, application performance, and security events.

Device Integration: Seamlessly integrating telemetry data collection from a wide range of network devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and cloud infrastructure. We support industry-standard protocols like NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, and gRPC.

Data Pipeline Advancement: Building robust and scalable data pipelines to ingest,process,and store telemetry data efficiently. This often involves utilizing technologies like Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Prometheus.

Custom Dashboard Creation: Developing intuitive and actionable dashboards that visualize telemetry data, enabling network engineers and security analysts to quickly identify and resolve issues. This is particularly valuable for users with accessibility needs, as highlighted in recent discussions regarding Farming Simulator 25 telemetry integration for visually impaired users.

Benefits of Providence’s Telemetry Solutions

Implementing a custom telemetry solution with Providence offers a multitude of benefits:

Proactive Problem Detection: Identify and resolve network issues before they impact users, minimizing downtime and improving service quality.

enhanced security Posture: Detect and respond to security threats in real-time by analyzing network traffic patterns and identifying anomalous behavior. network security monitoring is a core component of our telemetry offerings.

Optimized Network Performance: Gain insights into network utilization and identify bottlenecks, enabling you to optimize network resources and improve performance.

Improved Capacity Planning: Accurately forecast future network capacity needs based on historical telemetry data.

Reduced Operational Costs: Automate network monitoring and troubleshooting, freeing up valuable IT resources.

Telemetry Data Sources & Protocols

Understanding the various sources and protocols is crucial for effective telemetry implementation. here’s a breakdown:

NetFlow/IPFIX: Cisco’s NetFlow and its successor, IPFIX, are widely used protocols for collecting network traffic flow data. They provide insights into who is communicating with whom, when, and how much data is being transferred.

sFlow: Another flow-based protocol, sFlow, offers a sampling-based approach to traffic monitoring, making it suitable for high-speed networks.

gRPC: A modern, high-performance RPC framework often used for streaming telemetry data from network devices.

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol): While older, SNMP remains relevant for collecting device status and performance metrics.

Telemetry Streaming: Direct streaming of data from devices using protocols like gRPC or Kafka. This provides the lowest latency and highest granularity.

Real-World Application: Financial Services Firm

A leading financial services firm partnered with Providence to enhance their network security and compliance posture. They were facing challenges with detecting and responding to elegant cyberattacks. Providence implemented a custom telemetry solution that collected data from all network devices, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and servers.This data was analyzed in real-time using machine learning algorithms to identify anomalous behavior. As a result, the firm was able to detect and block several attempted attacks, preventing significant financial losses and protecting sensitive customer data. Financial network security is a key area where telemetry proves invaluable.

Practical Tips for Telemetry Implementation

Start Small: Begin with a pilot project focused on a specific area of the network.

Define Clear Objectives: Identify the specific problems you are trying to solve with telemetry.

Choose the Right Tools: Select telemetry collection, processing, and visualization tools that meet your needs and budget.

Ensure Data security: Implement appropriate security measures to protect telemetry data from unauthorized access.

Automate Everything: Automate the entire telemetry pipeline, from data collection to analysis and reporting.

Consider Open Standards: Utilizing open standards like OpenTelemetry promotes interoperability and avoids vendor lock-in.

The Future of Network Telemetry

The future of network telemetry is focused on automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).AI/ML algorithms will be used to automatically analyze telemetry data, identify anomalies, and predict future network behavior. This will enable network operators to proactively optimize network performance and security, and to automate many of the tasks that are currently performed manually. AI-powered network monitoring and predictive network analytics are emerging trends to watch.