Today's Guest Blog is from Surjit Ahluwalia* who leads the Global IOE Healthcare Solutions and Services Practice organization within the Advanced Services organization in Cisco.

On January 29th, 2016, Cisco joined forces with Extension Healthcare, a leading healthcare alarm safety and event response company, to create a plan, build and manage service that optimizes the network infrastructure for Extension Engage customers. Our two companies are combining our passion for improving clinical and patient experiences to deliver ahigh-performance workflow for every clinician and a powerful collaboration and communication platform for every hospital.

As a global leader in healthcare infrastructure technologies, Cisco has been on a mission to bring the power of "digital" to every healthcare organization.   In a world where they have to enable, differentiate and define their businesses leveraging digital technologies and devices, embracing a digital strategy will help them remain viable in an extremely cost sensitive environment where patient experience patient outcomes are key metrics.

Because the quality of any application and solution is only as good as the network that it's delivered on, Cisco has developed a Digital Healthcare Architecture (DHA), based on our Medical Grade Network best practices and guidelines, offering availability from anywhere at any time.  The DHA takes into account the unique requirements of healthcare for the following three key pillars:  security, mobility, as well as unified communication and collaboration technologies.

Our newly announced service, Cisco Connected Health Service with Extension Engage, leverages Cisco's DHA architecture and services expertise to maximize the success of Extension Engage deployments.

As Todd Plesko, CEO of Extension Healthcare, has said,  "No one company can handle all of the technical and environmental aspects of clinicians using smartphones and also deliver the clinical communication and collaboration platform to run on those smartphones. Our relationship with Cisco's Connected Health services team solves that problem by bringing two great companies together that will bring peace of mind to hospital executives that their environment is ready, their investment is safe, and the project is going to be successful."

What are other examples of how the healthcare industry can go digital? We invite you to share your thoughts in the comment section!

*Surjit Ahluwalia leads the Global IOE Healthcare Solutions and Services Practice organization within the Advanced Services organization in Cisco.  The focus of the organization include architectures and solutions based services for Connected Health offerings; specifically security, mobility, datacenter and collaboration.  The service offerings cover plan, build and manage spectrum including assessment, implementation and optimization services.

Surjit has been with Cisco for 8 years and has spent 15 years working at Intel in a variety of operations and engineering leadership roles.  Surjit also has CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) and CRISC certifications from ISACA.