Advanced Load Balancing Solutions for Healthcare and Hospitals
Maintain Always-On Secure Access to Critical Healthcare Applications
Get a Quote Get a Free TrialThe availability, performance and security of critical healthcare applications matter. But, if these applications go down, it can have serious consequences, from financial loss to legal risks to compromised patient care. Load balancing is the infrastructure layer that keeps hospital systems available, fast and resilient, even if traffic spikes or servers go down.
Healthcare Applications Require Reliable Load Balancing
The healthcare sector uses technology and applications that streamline patient-doctor interactions. These include applications for:
- Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
- Patient portals, virtual care platforms and online scheduling
- Connected medical devices and remote monitoring
- Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS)
- Billing and accounting systems
These are powerful, sophisticated applications that reduce operational costs and improve how healthcare organizations operate. The apps are universally deployed within a healthcare organization, making them a critical part of patient care so they can never simply be "down for maintenance."
Why Load Balancers Are Critical for Healthcare Application Delivery
Healthcare Doesn’t Pause, so Systems Can’t Either
Emergency departments, ICUs and on-call clinicians need continuous access to patient records. Unlike a retail outage that costs sales, an EHR outage can delay diagnoses, medication orders and handoffs between care teams.
Demand Is Unpredictable
Flu season, a mass-casualty event or a viral health scare can send patient portal and telehealth traffic soaring overnight. The IT infrastructure must be ready for sudden surges every day.
Hospital Networks Are Not Confined to One Building
Health systems with multiple campuses, clinics and remote care sites need consistent, reliable access to shared systems regardless of the location from which a clinician logs in.
No Shortcuts for Security and Compliance
Hospitals are frequent targets for cyberattacks and outages. HIPAA and similar regulations require encrypted traffic, audit trails and controlled access even while that traffic is being routed at scale. Infrastructure has to be both fast and provably secure.
To Maintain the Proper Functionality and Availability of Critical Healthcare Applications, the Underlying Network Infrastructure Must Deliver:
High Availability
Ensure uninterrupted access to EHR and clinical systems.
Scalability
Support sudden traffic spikes from telehealth or patient portals.
Performance Optimization
Minimize latency for real-time clinical decision-making.
Cost Efficiency
Reduce infrastructure overhead through optimized traffic distribution.
Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are one of the most important technologies for addressing performance and accessibility issues in these mission-critical applications.
Load balancers direct users to the best-performing, accessible server. Using various load balancing algorithms, an intelligent load balancer can distribute users to servers that offer the best possible performance by dynamically evaluating key server elements such as the number of concurrent connections and CPU/memory utilization.
To further enhance the user experience, more advanced load balancers provide SSL acceleration by offloading the encryption/decryption processes from application servers, thereby dramatically increasing their performance and reducing the time and costs associated with certificate management.
Progress Kemp LoadMaster Keeps Healthcare Running
For years, large corporations and institutions with mission-critical application initiatives were able to take advantage of server load balancing technology to significantly improve performance, availability and scalability of their applications. However, since e-healthcare is being deployed to reduce costs, it seems counterintuitive to spend money on the underlying infrastructure, especially on deploying ADCs.
For healthcare facilities, particularly small- to medium-sized hospitals/clinics, the high cost of acquiring this technology has significantly hampered their efforts to adopt e-healthcare applications.
The Progress® Kemp® LoadMaster® load balancing solution integrates powerful, stable, full-featured application delivery and server load balancing with the latest advancements in layer-7 content switching and SSL acceleration technologies.
The LoadMaster load balancing solution is ideal for healthcare providers.
High Availability and Performance
By distributing traffic across multiple servers, the LoadMaster solution eliminates single points of failure. If one server goes down, traffic automatically shifts so clinicians can keep working without interruption.
Built-in Scalability for Surge Events
With an efficient load balancing strategy powered by the LoadMaster solution, hospitals can absorb sudden traffic spikes without systems buckling under the load and without permanently over-provisioning hardware for occasional traffic spikes.
Stronger Security Posture
The LoadMaster solution provides an important layer of defense for an industry frequently targeted by attackers. It handles SSL/TLS encryption and can mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. It is easier to implement consistent security policies to maintain compliance.
Better ROI on IT Investments
Cost-effective LoadMaster load balancers enable efficient use of existing servers, reducing the need to invest in additional hardware and lowering long-term infrastructure costs.
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust Optimizes 24/7 Clinical IT Operations with Advanced Load Balancing Solution
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Next Steps
Every LoadMaster includes the core set of features that address the demands of Application Delivery and ensure service resilience with capabilities such as high availability and simplified administration with easy to use application templates
FAQs
Why is Kemp LoadMaster considered easy to manage for healthcare IT teams?
Critical healthcare applications require a reliable, high-performance network infrastructure that uses load balancers for scalability and availability. Healthcare providers rely on LoadMaster, with its advanced application delivery and server load balancing capabilities, to support stable and powerful performance.
How does Kemp LoadMaster integrate with healthcare applications like EHR systems?
Every aspect of a healthcare provider’s digital infrastructure requires reliability and speed, from electronic health records (EHR) to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) to telemedicine platforms. Progress Kemp LoadMaster solution is essential for managing the traffic to and from multiple healthcare applications, optimizing resource utilization and providing redundancy in case of failures.
What makes Kemp LoadMaster a strong choice among load balancing tools for hospitals?
With high availability, security, scalability and performance optimization, the Progress Kemp LoadMaster solution helps healthcare providers focus on what matters most, delivering high-quality care to their patients, with the peace of mind that their IT systems are running smoothly and securely.
