Access Security of Regional Healthcare

Background:

According to the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of Hierarchical Diagnosis and Treatment System (hereinafter referred to as the opinion) promulgated by the General Office of the State Council, the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment policy system will have been improved by 2017. A division of labor cooperation mechanism of medical and health institutions will be formed. The sinking of high-quality medical resources will be implemented in an orderly and effective manner. The talent team construction for primary healthcare with a focus on general practitioners will be enhanced. The utilization and overall benefit of medical resources will be further improved. The proportion of diagnosis and treatment volume of primary healthcare institutions will be increased. A more reasonable and standardized medical treatment order will be formed.

The opinion also requires establishing a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment policy system in line with our national conditions by 2020. The service capacity of hierarchical diagnosis and treatment will be fully improved. The guarantee mechanism will be gradually enhanced. A medical service system with a reasonable layout, appropriate scale, optimized hierarchy, clear responsibility, complete functions, and high efficiency will be established. The hierarchical diagnosis and treatment pattern where patients will be first treated at primary medical institutions and then transferred to hospitals with a higher level of specific treatment of either acute or chronic diseases.

Current issues:

1. The primary medical institutions should access the internal network of the hospital to synchronize patient information through a private network. Therefore, we need to build a communication channel to ensure that primary medical institutions can securely access the hospital's data centers.

2. The quality of different links is different and link availability is low.

3. It is time-consuming to solve VPN-related faults, which must rely on manual labor.

4. All service traffic shares the same VPN tunnel and is unable to be separated by applications.

5. The temporarily established tunnel may cause long tunnel negotiation time and congestion in the scenario where multiple branches come online simultaneously.

Solution:

Advantages:

1. Automatic switching of tunnels. If the quality of Tunnel A is degraded or interrupted, the firewall can automatically switch the service traffic to Tunnel B according to the load balancing algorithm and link quality detection technology, and when the quality of Tunnel A is restored, the traffic will automatically switch back, ensuring high-quality transmission of the service traffic.

2. Routing based on applications. It enables the selection of links of different quality depending on the criticality of the business, balancing cost and service quality.

3. Automatic establishment of tunnels that enables you to create a new tunnel without first packet, ensuring smooth Internet access.