LiveNX Proves Vital to Health of U.S. Renal’s IT Network

U.S. Renal Care clinics provide in-center and at- home hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis services for end stage renal disease. The company also manages several acute setting dialysis programs in conjunction with local community hospitals.

U.S. Renal Facts:

31 States
340 Sites
23,000 Patients

With more than 340 sites, the company serves more than 23,000 patients across 31 states and the Territory of Guam. Each facility is supported by experienced clinical and operations management to achieve the company’s mission of delivering the highest quality care. Local facilities are run through partnerships with physicians who serve as Medical Directors.

Business Challenges

The company’s Medical Directors rely on a sound, IT network infrastructure to support their facilities and the needs of their patients. To this end, U.S. Renal took a closer look at their IT network strategy with the goals of:

• Easy management of a LAN/WAN infrastructure.
• Improving network performance.
• Reducing the amount of help desk tickets.
• Proactively monitoring network traffic to identify and address potential issues before they impact the medical staff.

Technical Challenges

U.S. Renal determined a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) would enable them to achieve their business goals. Yet as they embarked on the SD-AN deployment, they faced challenges with:

• VoIP quality
• Latency
• Jitter

Historically, U.S. Renal’s voice quality was not consistent throughout the clinics, resulting in a high volume of trouble tickets. Not to mention the impact of poor network service on overall business performance and quality of patient service.

The Cure: LiveNX

Having seen LiveAction’s LiveNX network performance monitoring and analytics platform, U.S. Renal decided to invest in the technology to improve network performance for voice and video immediately and accelerate their SD-WAN deployment.

At U.S. Renal, LiveNX is primarily used for QoS policy management, monitoring voice traffic, and verifying the traffic is being routed properly and in accordance with network policies.

For example, LiveNX provides complete visibility into the traffic of more than 300 U.S. Renal clinics. And it monitors how the traffic travels through designated tunnels that are routed to a dedicated data center. Being able to see the traffic fall over from one data center to another allows network engineers to make design changes, verify and show them using LiveNX to see the traffic flow to the desired location.

According to Ben Hargrave, senior network engineer, “We struggled with having consistently high voice quality throughout our clinics. LiveNX makes it easy to understand what’s going on in the network so we can quickly spot the source of our issues and improve network performance overall.”

Results

Since deploying LiveNX, U.S. Renal has greater visibility into the network. This delivers the following benefits:

• Better voice quality through improved VoIP performance.
• The ability to quickly drill down to identify the source of issues.
• Easily tweak existing vector policies for the SD-WAN such as Easy QoS.
• Full redundancy when they need to temporarily take down a data center without impacting the performance of the entire network.
• Dramatically reduce the amount of trouble tickets.

U.S. Renal will continue to roll out LiveNX as a critical part of its SD-WAN strategy. Future plans include building custom QoS policies based on each clinic’s bandwidth as well as taking advantage of LiveAction’s LiveAgent to manage and monitor servers for even greater visibility among the clinics.

“We struggled with having consistently high voice quality throughout our clinics. LiveNX makes it easy to understand what’s going on in the network so we can quickly spot the source of our issues and improve network performance overall.”

– Ben Hargrave, Senior Network Engineer, U.S. Renal Care

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