Improving Site Reliability for Health Care Institutions

Millions of patients around the world rely on healthcare institutions and their services. Uptime and service reliability are critical to saving lives and delivering quality services to patients in times of need.

What is SRE in healthcare services?

SRE in healthcare is the result of treating operations as if it’s a software problem with a focus on healthcare service availability, latency, performance, and capacity.

Cloud technology is becoming critical to how healthcare professionals serve patients and SRE could prove the key to helping health tech achieve maximum uptake.

The challenges of SRE within healthcare

Service reliability within healthcare services can be the difference between life and death for some systems if they were to fail. Not only is there a huge financial cost but potentially a human one.

What if your healthcare services go down?

The NHS lost around £19 million in patient care output, based on the findings that 1% of NHS services were disrupted over a one-week period. A further £500,000 was spent on dealing with the immediate effects of IT failures and a further £72 million was spent to restore its services to full operation and to recover its data.

The cost both financially and operationally is something that makes service reliability and SRE mission-critical to your IT teams and operations.

Why healthcare institutions should focus on scaling reliable services

Technology is urging (in some practitioners’ view, threatening) healthcare to update how it does things.

Cloud-based technology gained true acceptance in healthcare around 2015 but many legacy systems, paper-based workflows, and faxed orders still exist today.

Chaos Engineering is one-way health care systems can be tested. Chaos experiments involve creating controlled boundary-pushing tests and are one type of SRE strategy that can be used to help better understand where the failure points of a healthcare system might be. 

SRE tools like Reliably, aim to create a culture shift amongst teams to embrace reliability and reduce stress and anxiety for the engineers in charge.

How our tools improve SRE within healthcare services

Different teams and departments will think about reliability differently and how it impacts customer satisfaction - Reliably provides the tools needed to reduce risk and provide secure, reliable, resilient, and always available services.

With Reliably you can

  • Be SLO-oriented

    Use an SLO oriented approach to reliability in financial services

  • Score your System Health

    Give a live view of system health through scoring

  • Shift Reliability Left

    Enable cultural shifts that promote and increase reliability

  • Measure & Track Reliability

    Define what a reliable system means to a team, and keep track of it

  • Integrate Chaos Engineering

    Proactively track weaknesses with Chaos Engineering

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FAQ

Can chaos engineering be used to test healthcare systems?
Yes, chaos engineering is one strategy to push the boundaries of your systems in a controlled environment. They help answer the “what if” questions around system failure and offer a variety of experiments you can use to test.
What are the qualities of a good healthcare system?
Services that are available 24/7 365 days a year are important as well as data accuracy, service availability, processing time, and data and system security.
What is a shift-left culture in healthcare?
Shift-left culture in healthcare means empowering engineers and developers to be more proactive and mindful of their users’ experience by increasing access to tools that allow them to define what good looks like in their system.
Can I try Reliably for free?
Yes, sign up for free (no credit card required) and get started with defining and observing your reliability. You can cancel any time and you won't be charged anything.