Solution Brief
Healthcare
Fueling Innovation
in Healthcare
and Life Sciences
Transformation in Healthcare:
industry view
It is no secret that the era of transformation and
exponential growth in healthcare is here. We can
see the huge impact this change is creating for health
providers with disruptions affecting firms across the
industry. A key shift is an increased emphasis on
patient-centric care and more intelligent use of data
for better patient outcomes. With these demands,
organizations are experiencing uncertainty, cost
pressures and increasing complexity. The life sciences
industry is facing new pressures to accelerate
innovation and shorten development cycles. Smaller
organizations are finding that small closets of IT
infrastructure are sprawling without the required
oversight and control. Large global organizations
are faced with declining revenue. Yet they are being
pressed to modernize their core information systems,
secure the growing number of devices and users
accessing their network and provide new digital
engagement to remote clinicians and patients.
They’re also pressured to drive health innovation
leveraging cloud, AI, and data sharing across the
health ecosystems.
Healthcare and Life Sciences
Organizations include:
§ Pharmaceutical firms
§ Biotechnology firms
§ Healthcare facilities
§ Medical goods and services providers
§ Healthcare facility operators
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However, along with these challenges there is also
a tremendous opportunity in this dynamic industry
driven by technology innovations. Significant shifts are
occurring, not only disrupting the traditional healthcare,
life sciences, pharma and biotech business models, but
also setting heightened expectations for value-based,
personalized healthcare; a march towards technology
to modernize patient-intelligent systems; and a focus
on consumers’ needs to offer satisfying experiences.
To address the requirements for value-based healthcare
and implement business-critical initiatives, healthcare
organizations need to transform by:
§ Deploying a patient-intelligent core to securely
leverage real-time data at smart exchange points
and to support engagement with the ecosystem.
§ Extending digital products and services closer
to patients and users while leveraging intelligent
and secure user data to support superior patient
outcomes and experiences.
§ Scaling collaboration by integrating patient-centered
ecosystem touch points and workflows from a rich set
of health delivery organizations (HDOs), life sciences
organizations, research institutions and
their suppliers.
§ Evaluating adaptive partnerships to accelerate
innovation and build new revenue streams such
as remote patient monitoring.
§ Investing in resilient supply chain strategies to
ensure timely delivery of much needed personal
protective equipment (PPE), medication and other
clinical supplies.
Technological advances may be real, but many
healthcare organizations who are protecting their
traditional IT and business models are struggling.
 Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 2

Requirements to maintain regulatory compliance and § More efficient medical supply chains
patient health standards demand low-risk solutions,
slowing early cloud and digital adoption. § Faster, more effective therapy development
With patient care and experience now at the center To understand the potential for innovations and
of the universe, healthcare organizations have to disruptions, consider these findings from global
grapple with: analyst firm IDC. Over the next few years, these insights
show a rise in the use of AI for automation
§ New digital challenges, along with the adoption of and decision-making, spending increases on connected
advanced infrastructure and medical technologies/ health technologies, two times the investment in health
Internet of Medical Things (IOMT) information exchange by life science firms and a 40%
rise in hyperconnected innovation delivered
§ New pressures to accelerate innovation and shorten by industry ecosystems.
development cycles.
Digital infrastructure Digital
These challenges include regulatory agency privacy modernization engagement
safeguards, increased cyberattacks, explosion in
storage and processing for big data exchange,
collaboration and personalization. The onset of the
60% 70%
COVID-19 pandemic has heightened these pressures, Of healthcare organizations Increase in spending will be
will leverage an IT infrastructure made on connected health
leaving the industry in a state of flux as organizations
built on a data platform technologies by providers
try to balance solving these challenges while using AI to improve process and life science companies
managing costs. automation and decision- by 2023. Driven by digitally
making by 2024. enabled remote care and
clinical trials and fueled by
COVID-19.
Top digital trends disrupting
the healthcare industry Health information Health
exchange innovations

2x
To understand how digital infrastructure supports
future health needs, it is crucial to recognize the forces
that are driving the industry’s requirements as well as
The volume of investments
the key role digital infrastructure plays in accelerating that will be made by life science
the digital transformation journey with new capabilities. companies in digital initiatives
to support the utilization of
real-world evidence by 2022.
40%
Of hyperconnected
innovation will be driven
by large-scale goals and
delivered via industry
ecosystems by 2025.

As a result of the pandemic,

Technology innovators are reshaping
consumer expectations for healthcare.
Today’s consumers expect personalized,
device-enabled, intuitive 24/7 service
that revolves around convenience and
empowerment in all areas of their lives.
20% of healthcare organizations
will embrace integrated care to
improve outcomes during 2021.
Sources: IDC’s Tech and Industry Pulse Survey, 2019-2020; IDC
US Vertical Survey 2019; IDC’s Worldwide Covid-19 impact survey
(Wave 6–8-12 June 2020); IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Health
Industry 2021 Predictions

McKinsey
As organizations are fast uncovering the huge potential
with emerging technologies reshaping healthcare in
multiple ways, it is clear that the top digital trends
disrupting the industry revolve around:
§ Modernized transactions and data infrastructure
§ New, personalized and intuitive healthcare
ecosystems
These trends are averages, meaning that there are
companies who are ahead of these trends, but there
are also those who are behind and need additional help
to catch up. In either case, HDOs rely on technology
partners to help guide them throughout their digital
transformation journey.
Those who are capturing the digital transformation
opportunity with digital healthcare can provide
better outcomes and more successful solutions
and create value-based care for patients.

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That speed of transformational change can be
impacted by a combination of technologies
that include:
§ Connected and cognitive devices for monitoring
patient vitals
§ Targeted and personalized medicine and designer
genetic drugs
§ Robotics to aid surgery
§ AI for predictive health analytics, phenotyping,
plotting surgical paths and medical data set analysis
§ Collaboration systems and applications for real-time
clinical ecosystem interactions
These technologies are affecting how fast firms
can leverage opportunities like:
Patient-centered, value-based healthcare
and seamless integration of monitoring
and care delivery
Exponential growth in telehealth
and virtual care
Real-time, secure collaboration and
data exchange with patients, partners
and health ecosystems
New digital value chains and care
delivery models
Device-enabled, autonomous care
and cognitive engagement
A rise in the remote workforce,
worker safety measures and wellness
Gaining digital health
advantage at software speed
Today’s healthcare staff need secure and agile
infrastructure that makes collaboration and digital
workflows possible—shifting from manual, rigid and
device-centric to automated, flexible and software-
driven. It also means shifting analytics from historical
to predictive and real-time, while simultaneously
embedding security throughout the clinical application
stack to protect a patient’s data and devices.
Healthcare and pharmaceutical producers are both
struggling to bring patients to the center of their
processes. This creates a universal requirement to
enhance collaboration and data access.
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Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 3
Additionally, they need to offer new forms of
remote care services and provide personalized
patient experiences.
Imagine a healthcare institution with a clinic and
research center; clinicians and patients are seamlessly
engaged in telehealth consultations over their devices
from anywhere globally. Patients will be able to
easily access mobile-first applications for scheduling
appointments and care coordination. Reports would be
shared over a highly secure portal accessed only by the
patient and providing access control to their personal
health data. Researchers could use applications for
pharma research, predictive health analytics and
population health management. All these would be
connected to a cohesive data infrastructure that
allows easy collaboration, secure real-time access,
and exchange of data across the ecosystem.
The Solution
This is where Equinix can help. As the world’s digital
infrastructure company™, Equinix is powering leading
healthcare organizations globally with innovative
solutions to enable the delivery of cutting-edge care.
Platform Equinix®—the world’s digital infrastructure
platform—can help these firms to transform and to
modernize their infrastructure to support the following:
Patient-Intelligent Core:
To transform core business capabilities through a
distributed hybrid infrastructure, larger healthcare
providers and pharmaceutical companies are using
Platform Equinix to establish their digital core to:
§ Better leverage data to offer new digital
patient experiences
§ Modernize hybrid IT capabilities
§ Secure IoT platforms
§ Expand access to and deliver data-driven care
§ Engage remote staff and clinicians securely
§ Address security, privacy and compliance issues
By leveraging this digital core, they are able to
accelerate critical innovation by enabling AI/ML for
real-time processing, corporate application scale and
personalized clinical data.
For example, Figure 1 shows a strategy where
Platform Equinix is used to house critical core
applications, which can include mission-critical
applications, EHR/PACS, supply chain management
and inventory control and a research data warehouse.
 Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 4

Azure Stack
Mobile back-haul
path

Wifi
Network

Microsoft Corporate and

ExpressRoute Vnet GW VM scale set Storage
Clinical Apps
High speed
local loop Core Clinical
Apps & Clinical and
Compute Research Storage
Regional
Hospitals

Equinix
Router/FW
Metro FabricTM AWS Virtual Private Cloud
Ethernet
Equinix Research Data
Metal™ Warehouse
CRO
HQ
EHR/PACS | Supply Chain Management |
Inventory Control
Elastic Load Research &
VPG Balancing clinical Apps
Redundant
fiber paths
AWS EC2 Instances
Provider Direct Connect Auto Scaling
Data Center 1G/10G

Figure 1: Digital Core

We provide Equinix Metal™ to avoid the need for capital consumers, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical
purchase of servers, storage and appliances. This companies and biotech research companies are
core infrastructure is then connected to the regional using digital exchange to:
hospitals, research labs, CROs and the like via direct
internet access using Equinix Connect, MPLS from § Master collaboration at scale with digital exchange
a local NSP, site-to-site VPN, Equinix Network Edge
Services and/or using a local fibre ring. From inside § Maximize outcomes and expand markets
Platform Equinix®, these applications can leverage
Equinix Fabric™—which provides software-defined
§ Maintain clinical and business continuity
interconnection—to connect to cloud service providers § Access the highest value ecosystems
like AWS and Microsoft Azure to handle a variety of
tasks. These can include numerical processing of AI/ML § Go to market faster and be agile
workloads, peripheral clinical and research applications
that need access to the digital core or common back They can tailor their infrastructure to support
office applications like Microsoft Office 365, HR or innovation and collaboration by interconnecting
financial processing, etc. with leading health IT service providers, cloud, SaaS,
clinical and business partners on Platform Equinix,
This type of architecture provides several advantages. leveraging secure, high-performing and direct data
First, it’s easy to scale the physical size of the core exchange across the healthcare ecosystem
digital infrastructure as needed using Platform Equinix participants on the platform.
as the environment grows organically. Second, as new
cloud and SaaS-based technology and services become To support agile health, a digital exchange must
available, they are easily interconnected using Equinix be available to all stakeholders, which requires an
Fabric, our global, SD-WAN-based network backbone. architecture with numerous points of presence where
Third, as needs arise and environments change, using regional access is desired. Figure 2 below highlights
Platform Equinix to pivot workloads to other CSPs the needed design. As noted, two or more regional
becomes an easy task. This simplistic design results hubs can be created on Platform Equinix—for example,
in significant performance improvement. Placing core one in Silicon Valley and another in Ashburn. Each
digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix can radically regional hub has a data store for the core exchange of
reduce packet round-trip time and allows for the data which can include patient health records, access
dynamic scaling of bandwidth. Your core infrastructure controls, raw research data, refined and analyzed
will be proximal to your partners’ core infrastructure. research data, various supply chain reports, indication
and contra-indication reports, etc. By using replication
Agile Health Interoperability: technology, this data can be replicated anywhere on
To participate in digital business exchanges, the planet for local access, where the data is eventually
optimally engage in the health ecosystem, and consistent across hubs.
support new business models close to patients and

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Inter-Metro
Remote Virtual
Data Center
Life Sciences Life Sciences Medical Data
NSP
WAN System Cage Exchange
Provider Network
NSP
WAN Edge
Pharma
NSP
WAN
AI/ML Technologies
Generative AI
Figure 2: Digital Exchange
Access to digital exchange is enabled with just
a port (or two) on Equinix Fabric™ by anyone
currently on Platform Equinix®. For those who don’t
have a presence with Equinix, we provide Network
Edge Services to extend any customers’ SD-WAN into
Equinix via the public internet or using a network
service provider (NSP). Once on the platform, it’s
up to the stewards of the medical data exchange to
grant access to some or all of the data contained,
based on need to know and/or any defined governance
structure. Technologies such as block-chain can be used
to secure PHI (protected health information) This type
of design is extremely flexible, high-performing and
easy to scale as needed, plus provides critical access to
information that supports emergent care scenarios, new
pandemic-driven drug and treatment development,
worldwide distribution of medical supplies and many
other use cases.
Personalized Digital Services:
To deliver new digital experiences that lead to improved
health outcomes and establish business operations
geographically close to users and endpoints, healthcare
companies are extending their digital infrastructure
to their digital edge to offer new patient experiences
across the continuum of care. By moving digital
infrastructure closer to users and concentrations
of facilities, they securely engage remote staff and
clinicians and enable local analytics as they aggregate
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Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 5
Circuits
Data Center
Equinix Medical Data CRO
CRO Cage NSP
FabricTM Exchange WAN
Network Higher -Ed
NSP
Edge WAN
Genomics
WAN
On-Net
data for both research and health outcomes.
This enables them to offer:
§ Tele-health services and engagement of remote staff
§ Services at the cloud edge like patient billing and
patient engagement for clinical trials
§ Proactive insights and real-time processing
§ Transformed facilities
§ Transformed patient and user experiences
In the example in Figure 3, a provider system with a
hub on Platform Equinix is dealing with both a remote
workforce and a new home health initiative. In this case,
they can leverage Equinix Connect for direct internet
access enabling remote home health devices, such as
heart monitors, perfusion pumps, etc. to send their data
back to the main EHR system. It may also be possible
to include radiological imaging in remote care scenarios
via home health clinicians, especially sonograms. In the
home setting, clinicians will need live access to patient
records as well. The care data can be sent directly back
to the local regional hub for more permanent storage in
the core EHR/PACS systems.
This same architecture also allows for simultaneous
access to a cloud environment and provides a regional
network aggregation point next to the cloud on-
ramps. Similarly, remote clinicians, researchers and
 Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 6

Mobile Devices,
Health Iot, Patient
Diagnostics
Equinix Direct
Connect
Mobile back-haul
path

Wifi
Network

Internet Remote Clinicians,

Exchange workforce Researchers
High speed
local loop Core Clinical
Apps & Clinical and
Compute Research Storage
Regional
Hospitals

Equinix
Router/FW
Metro FabricTM AWS Virtual Private Cloud
Ethernet
Equinix Research Data
Metal™ Warehouse
CRO
HQ
EHR/PACS | Supply Chain Management |
Inventory Control
Elastic Load Research&
VPG Balancing Clinical Apps
Redundant
fiber paths
AWS EC2 Instances
Provider Direct Connect Auto Scaling
Data Center 1G/10G

Figure 3: Digital Edge

administrators can access this key information from They can also easily extend their infrastructure to
the hub using the Equinix Internet Exchange, which is a support innovation and collaboration by scaling their
public peering point that would provide direct network AI/ML infrastructure to interconnect with cloud and
access via one or more regional NSPs providing an business partners, and to benefit from data exchange
optimal route for remote workers. In the case of a across healthcare ecosystem participants.
VDI environment, this could dramatically improve
performance in data and image access over using The growth rate of interconnection in the industry is
the public Internet. showing us how this solution is powering an advantage.
The Global Interconnection Index, an annual report
published by Equinix, shows where these healthcare
organizations are deploying. As they extend digital
Equinix helps healthcare infrastructure to modernize IT and scale for better
digital leaders create the collaboration and data exchange, they are benefitting
foundational infrastructure from access to all the key metros available on the
Equinix platform. Here is an example of the journey
they need to succeed these leaders are on.
By leveraging Equinix as their digital infrastructure
platform, healthcare organizations are able to bring
Healthcare Interconnection Bandwidth Growth
together all the right places, partners and possibilities 300,000
to create the foundational infrastructure they need
to succeed. 250,000

47%
With this foundation, healthcare organizations 200,000 CAGR

are deploying infrastructure in cloud adjacent

hubs to establish the multi-hybrid platform needed 150,000

to modernize their information systems to build

100,000
patient-centric services delivering exceptional value.
By extending their digital infrastructure closer to 50,000

patients and users, they can securely engage remote

staff and clinicians, offer enriching patient experiences -
2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
through the continuum of care, and provide local North America EMEA AP LATAM

analytics as they aggregate data for both research

and health outcomes.

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 Fueling Innovation in Healthcare and Life Sciences 7

AMERICAS EMEA ASIA-PACIFIC

VANCOUVER
HELSINKI
CALGARY STOCKHOLM
WINNIPEG OTTAWA
KAMLOOPS MANCHESTER DÜSSELDORF
MONTREAL OSAKA
SEATTLE TORONTO AMSTERDAM TOKYO
SAINT JOHN SEOUL
DUBLIN LONDON
CHICAGO
SILICON DENVER SHANGHAI
VALLEY BOSTON HAMBURG
NEW YORK HONG KONG
WARSAW
PHILADELPHIA
DALLAS WASHINGTON, D.C. BRUSSELS FRANKFURT
LOS ANGELES CULPEPER, VA
ATLANTA
PARIS MUNICH
MONTERREY HOUSTON
MIAMI SINGAPORE
GENEVA
MILAN SOFIA
MADRID
MEXICO CITY ZURICH
ISTANBUL
BARCELONA
SEVILLE

BOGOTÁ LISBON BRISBANE

Healthcare and PERTH
Life Sciences Hubs ADELAIDE SYDNEY
Equinix Location DUBAI*
MELBOURNE
Equinix Fabric™ Location ABU DHABI CANBERRA
SÃO PAULO
Equinix Fabric Coming Soon RIO DE JANEIRO MUSCAT

Partner Data Center

*Provides connectivity to local
clouds within the UAE.

Healthcare and life sciences lead the traditional To address these challenges and transform, we’re
enterprise industries in interconnection bandwidth helping healthcare digital leaders establish a
growth as they meet new mandates triggered competitive advantage on the Equinix global platform.
by COVID-19. Cross-industry collaboration and They can simultaneously meet growing demands for
geographically distributed digital services are agile, patient-centric services, reduce costs while
expected to drive a 5x increase of interconnection expanding capabilities closer to users and launch new
bandwidth with a 47% CAGR by 2023. services that will maximize patient outcomes, insights
and innovation—now and in the future.

Conclusion
Amid a global health crisis, the demand for expanded
patient-centric care and data-driven innovation to
improve health outcomes is resulting in a new focus on
digital transformation, making healthcare an exciting
industry. Health delivery organizations, payers and Learn how healthcare provider
life sciences companies all have a stake in improving
patient care. Opportunities for investments in new
Sentara modernized its digital
digital value chains and personalized ecosystems of infrastructure to accelerate
care delivery have emerged. The road to transformation and scale patient care.
is not without its challenges, however. Requirements
to maintain regulatory compliance and patient health Contact us to schedule a strategy
standards demand low-risk solutions, slowing early
cloud and digital adoption. Additionally, the global briefing today.
pandemic challenge has forced health providers to
cope with a steep reduction in their primary revenue
stream for ambulatory care with a simultaneous
increase in demand on the emergent care side.

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