Infrastructure remains a top priority in an evolving healthcare environment

As healthcare delivery becomes more distributed, digital, and time-sensitive, infrastructure reliability matters more. However, reliability is not measured by system uptime alone; it is now benchmarked by predictable performance under pressure.

This is due to a number of factors. Clinical systems require near-continuous availability, and healthcare organizations (HCOs) rely on mobile tools and secure messaging. They also need secure, real-time data access to health records, remote monitoring devices and test results. These demands have elevated network infrastructure and connectivity into an essential strategic pillar of healthcare.

These conclusions are drawn from CHIME’s Strategic Intelligence Report: Infrastructure, which analyzes findings from the latest Digital Health Most Wired Survey.

Over the years, infrastructure has consistently ranked as a top priority for healthcare leaders, alongside cybersecurity and clinical quality. Across organizations of all sizes, infrastructure underpins the success of every other digital initiative. Cybersecurity controls cannot function without reliable networks and identity services. Clinical quality depends on uninterrupted access to systems, data, and communication tools at the point of care.  

New pressures on healthcare infrastructure continue to emerge. These include AI-driven workflows, distributed care models and hospital-at-home programs. Infrastructure’s role in healthcare grows more central due to these pressures. Once viewed as a supporting function, today it must connect security, safety, and innovation at scale.

“Uptime is more than an IT metric. It is a patient-safety commitment. Reliability and connectivity must extend seamlessly from the data center to every bedside, clinic, and hospital so care teams can trust the experience wherever they work,” explains Gunnar Peters, VP, Connectivity Services, Spectrum Business.

HCOs are now preparing for the next digital phase. Infrastructure readiness now requires more than recovery and uptime. It requires seamless, mobile, and data-intensive care, and support everywhere.

Building resilient infrastructure for digital care

The Digital Health Most Wired findings highlight practices to increase infrastructure resilience. That resilience depends on governance, testing, measurement, and investment consistency.

The following recommendations can be seen as guidelines for more mature, stable HCO infrastructure:

Formalize infrastructure governance as an executive discipline: Move infrastructure decision-making out of ad hoc forums and into formally chartered, executive-approved, governance structures. High-performing organizations should treat infrastructure as a shared operational dependency. Clear agendas, regular cadence, and defined authority enable proactive investment rather than reactive remediation.  

Shift patch management from policy to an SLA execution: Treat patching and change control as time-bound operational commitments, not aspirational best practices. Organizations with higher maturity define service-level expectations for remediation and embed accountability across infrastructure and security teams. 

Rehearse for end-to-end disaster recovery: Move beyond documentation and partial testing toward regular, zero impact disaster recovery exercises that validate full clinical workflows. Leading organizations are testing identity, network access, wireless connectivity, and communication tools alongside core applications, ensuring that recovery restores usability. 

Measure root causes, not just downtime: Expand infrastructure metrics beyond uptime and outage counts to include the signals that explain failure and predict risk. Tracking dependency performance, alert efficiency, and recovery behavior enables teams to understand why disruptions occur and to prevent recurrence. 

Standardize measurement across hybrid environments: As hybrid and multi-cloud architectures become universal, HCOs must apply consistent monitoring, alerting, and recovery metrics across environments. Standardized measurement enables leaders to assess infrastructure behavior holistically.  

Define recovery success by clinical usability: Redefine infrastructure resilience in terms clinicians recognize. Systems are not truly recovered until care teams can authenticate, communicate, and act at the point of care. 

Align staffing and investment with resilience expectations: Organizations that test more frequently, measure more deeply, and modernize more predictably do so because they understand that sustained investment in people and processes is essential to turning infrastructure reliability. 

The continuing elevation of infrastructure importance

Looking ahead, emerging care models will further elevate infrastructure’s role. Mobile workflows, AI-enabled clinical support, and care delivered beyond traditional facilities will depend on reliable, low-latency connectivity and tightly coordinated supporting services. In this environment, infrastructure is no longer a background function — it is a prerequisite for safety, trust, and scale.  

The organizations best positioned for what comes next will be those that treat infrastructure as a shared responsibility and a strategic imperative. By governing deliberately, measuring meaningfully, and investing consistently, healthcare leaders can ensure that infrastructure reliability translates into confident care delivery today, and readiness for the demands of tomorrow.

Considering managed solutions

Although most HCOs have extremely capable and diligent IT personnel, many find it extremely hard to find, hire, train and retain the people to keep those teams fully staffed. As a result, their IT teams are overwhelmed by the enormity of their tasks. This has caused many HCOs to seek out managed network service partners to assume responsibility for tasks like maintenance, testing and updates, thereby freeing their in-house IT to concentrate on the many pressing concerns they must address. 

Your goals are our priorities. Let’s talk.

We understand and fully support that the enduring goal of healthcare professionals is to improve outcomes and clinical and patient experiences. We collaborate with your team to achieve your goals with a customizable, scalable, network infrastructure. Find out why we’ve partnered with more than 90% of US HCOs to provide secure connectivity and communications solutions.

Download the complete CHIME Digital Health Most Wired Survey’s Strategic Intelligence Report: Infrastructure, sponsored by Spectrum Business.