How healthcare organizations transform IT with Red Hat

To deliver better patient care and make access to data easier for doctors, healthcare organizations need a modern IT infrastructure. Powered by Red Hat® technologies, IT teams in healthcare settings unify the management of virtual machines (VMs) and containers to reduce costs and modernize applications in cloud-native environments to improve hospital systems. Red Hat supports healthcare IT teams in the development of AI-based solutions to optimize resources, and automate IT management at scale to boost efficiency. Discover 4 steps to transforming IT in healthcare organizations.

IT infrastructure can often be outdated, overly complex, and costly to maintain in healthcare organizations, particularly when managing virtual environments. With some healthcare IT teams having up to 250-plus VMs supporting critical services, they often lack the scalability and flexibility to meet growing demands. To address these challenges, IT teams in the healthcare sector need to simplify management, increase efficiency, and reduce reliance on existing vendors.

How Red Hat helps: Healthcare organizations work with Red Hat to develop roadmaps to migrate existing VM environments to Red Hat OpenShift® using the built-in virtualization feature. With Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, healthcare IT teams can run containers and VMs on the same platform to support existing workloads while modernizing applications. Red Hat experts design flexible architectures and conduct successful large-scale migrations with minimal disruption to day-to-day hospital operations. A modern application platform integrates application programming interface (API) management, IT automation capabilities, and third-party solutions for storage and data protection. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization also provides VM backups and data protection through APIs while delivering exceptional performance and high availability.

With the ability to support up to 10,000 VMs and 500 nodes per cluster, Red Hat OpenShift offers the scalability required to meet the future needs of healthcare organizations. By adopting an open-source approach, these organizations can avoid vendor lockin and foster greater innovation and flexibility for future growth.

Improving patient management and operational efficiency is a key focus for application modernization efforts in healthcare IT, specifically, improving the management and security of APIs that connect these vital systems. Healthcare organizations often lack a modern solution for API lifecycle management and rely on point-to-point virtual private networks (VPNs) for API access. This approach creates challenges for any healthcare IT team in maintaining robust security and governance.

How Red Hat helps: Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Application Foundations streamline API management and application modernization. Application Foundations provides tools to simplify the design, deployment, connection, security, and scaling of cloud-native applications. Together with Red Hat OpenShift, this creates a robust, consistent platform for application development and modernization.

The platform includes tools such as Red Hat 3scale API Management, Camel, and Kafka for real-time data streaming and comprehensive API control. Features like API traffic management, rate limiting, and enhanced security help the healthcare organization simplify governance and real-time data processing. As IT teams continue their modernization efforts, migrating core hospital management systems to Red Hat OpenShift is becoming an increasingly important activity for the roadmap.

Healthcare organizations have a network of busy hospitals, so optimizing workflows for better bed management and smoother operations is always a key objective. Hospitals seek effective solutions to provide real-time patient analytics to support faster decision-making.

How Red Hat helps: Red Hat OpenShift AI helps data engineers to refine and deploy AI solutions, such as enhanced hospital bed management and intelligent scheduling systems.* OpenShift AI provides a flexible, scalable platform for developing and delivering AI-enabled applications at scale.

Among Red Hat customers in the healthcare sector, planned AI-based innovations have included a text-based query feature for accessing physicians’ prescriptions, aimed at improving decision making and reducing manual effort, and predictive analytics and advanced automation to optimize hospital resource management and streamline operations.*

Manual management of storage, networks, and VMs hinders healthcare organizations’ IT efficiency. Scaling systems and managing storage prove particularly challenging, leading organizations to explore automation solutions to reduce operational complexity and costs.

How Red Hat helps: Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes simplifies management as workloads grow, providing a unified view of clusters and resources while consistently enforcing security policies across environments.

Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform—a unified solution for large-scale IT automation—is used by hospitals and in other healthcare settings to automate repetitive and time-consuming IT management tasks. This approach increases system reliability, improves efficiency, and optimizes resource management.