When most people think of digital businesses, names like Uber, Tesla and AirBnb come to mind. These companies were born in the digital era and have rapidly disrupted their markets.
Those aren’t the only digital companies, though. A number of other companies in verticals such as education, retail and healthcare have been aggressive with their digital plans.
One such company is Augmedix. The San Francisco-based company simplifies how doctors create electronic health records (EHRs) with a technology-enabled, HIPAA-compliant documentation solution for physicians.
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The amount of documentation required to provide quality healthcare in the U.S. has steadily increased, and many doctors are overwhelmed with this task. The goal of the Augmedix solution is to lessen this burden and re-humanize the doctor-patient relationship. The Augmedix solution saves doctors an average of 15 hours a week, enabling them to see more patients and spend more time them. This results in increased provider satisfaction, improved patient experience, higher-quality notes and timely note completion. The company has partnered with several national health systems and has happy users all over the country, serving tens of thousands of patients per month.
Fast and reliable connectivity an absolute necessity
The digital services are highly network-centric, creating a challenge for Augmedix because the legacy networks could not meet the needs of this solution. The company enables doctors to use wearable technology such as Google Glass and to communicate in real time with scribes placed in remote locations to document health records of patients. The doctors’ narration is carried through a VMware cloud data center located in the U.S. to branch offices across the globe using a remote desktop-based Internet of Things (IoT) application. The scribes can then use this information to produce the health record documentation.
This digital system requires real-time collaboration between the U.S.-based doctors and the globally distributed scribes. Fast and reliable connectivity between the VMware data centers in the U.S. and the other locations across globe was an absolute necessity. However, Augmedix was having a difficult time designing a network that could meet these stringent demands.
The internet is pervasive, but when used for connectivity across long distances, it delivers poor performance due to high latency and congestion and packet loss.
Low and predictable latency is key to ensuring a smooth user experience with real-time applications such as the IoT application used by the Augmedix service.
The company sought out a reliable, global connectivity solution that could meet the demands of its revolutionary technology. Augmedix looked at private services, such as MPLS, but these were not viable for partner integration due to the lack of control over the partner network.
Augmedix deployed Aryaka Network’s global SD-WAN as the foundation of its application. This global SD-WAN solution provides the necessary reliability and speed to connect the VMware clouds with partner locations. Aryaka’s service consists of a global private network that bypasses the congested, highly unpredictable public internet and delivers fast and stable connections between global locations. This provides outstanding application and a high-quality user experience.
Augmedix was able to leverage its existing internet connections to be the “on-ramp” to the nearest Aryaka Point of Presence (PoP) and experienced enterprise-class private connectivity between the locations scattered in the various geographies.
The Aryaka solution provided Augmedix with the following benefits:
- Fast and stable connectivity, with reliable and scalable WAN bandwidth
- Negligible packet loss on the network
- Real-time network and application visibility
- 24×7 CCIE-level customer support
Aryaka’s global SD-WAN service was the final ingredient in the Augmedix solution. Now doctors all over the country are able to reduce the time it takes to document patient information and can devote more time to helping people.
The revolutionary healthcare solution is an outstanding example of a digital application, but it is highly dependent on the underlying network. Any organization looking to become a digital organization should take a lesson from Augmedix and look at the network to ensure it can meet the demands of an increasingly digital world.