Health systems are expanding artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives across imaging, diagnostics and patient-facing workflows, underscoring the shifting role of the on-premises data center from a legacy infrastructure component to a critical performance layer.

The evolution is driven by rising clinical workloads that demand faster data access, tighter service-level expectations and compute capacity positioned closer to the point of care.

It’s a shift that reflects both longstanding realities in healthcare IT and the accelerating demands of care delivery enabled by AI, says Murali Gandluru, vice president of product management, data center networking at Cisco. He notes that care teams and patients depend on applications and data that are increasingly distributed across environments.

While cloud services — public, private or hosted — now power a significant portion of healthcare software and productivity tools, that model is not sufficient for every workload, particularly those tied directly to patient care.

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