Towards an SDN/NFV based Network Infrastructure for Hospital Information Systems and Healthcare Services

Today’s hospitals have become extremely dependent on technology to providing valuable patient services. From collecting as well as administering data of patients to delivering advanced therapies. The network infrastructure of the hospital is charged to provide various solution that are mission critical to address the increasing demands of healthcare services. Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization will improve infrastructure agility, making it easier to design, deliver and use networking services in a dynamic and scalable environment. Combining SDN and NFV provides significant benefits throughout the infrastructure network. Additionally, external parties are able to use infrastructure services in order to establish new service offerings. The infrastructure services are opened for many parties like developers of applications and service vendors. In this article, we first highlight some of the issues in the hospital information system (HIS) and healthcare services which network infrastructure will eventually confront. Then, concepts of SDN as well as NFV are presented. In addition, description of the benefits that SDN and NFV have for HIS and healthcare services. Finally, a new multi-layer architecture based on SDN and NFV is proposed and how this architecture can deal with the existing challenges of HIS and healthcare services.