A few weeks ago, on a trip from my office to my kitchen (I work from home), I stepped in a tiny puddle left by an ice cube that had hit the floor earlier that day. I didn’t fall. It wasn’t dramatic. But something in my knee didn’t like what I did to it.
After a few days of assuming it would heal on its own, I booked an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon I know at a hospital near my home in Florida. He poked around, gave me a preliminary diagnosis, and sent me for an MRI.
That afternoon his office called. My results were in, but they couldn’t get them to me because “the computers are down.”
A month earlier, at an unrelated appointment, the front desk couldn’t check me in. Same reason.
I’ve spent my career in network and infrastructure technology, at CA, SevOne, IBM, and now Parlon. The computer is almost never what’s broken. When someone at a front desk says “the computer,” they mean something failed between their desk and the systems they depend on, and care stops until IT finds it.
This happens all the time. Once in a while it makes the news. Most of the time it shows up as a delayed check-in, a result that can’t be released, or a patient sent home to wait.
The IT teams running hospital networks are excellent. Many of them are stuck with tools built for a different era. Those tools poll devices, wait for a threshold to trip, and raise an alert after something is already broken. EMA’s 2026 research found that 42% of network incidents are still handled reactively. In a hospital, that usually means the front desk finds out first.
We built Parlon to change that order. Active synthetic tests run continuously from inside the clinic, the data center, and the cloud. They follow the same paths a clinician’s workstation uses to reach the EHR, imaging, and scheduling systems. When a path starts to degrade, the IT team sees it before a patient does. Those tests run on the same platform as device telemetry from more than 250 vendors, normalized as it arrives. That means the team can tell right away whether the problem is a switch, a WAN link, DNS, or an application, without spending the first hour of an incident figuring out where to look.
The stakes keep rising. Health systems are moving more care off the main campus into regional and ambulatory sites, and every new site adds network paths between the patient and their record.
One of our first customers is a healthcare provider with more than 1,000 clinic locations. They run Parlon air-gapped and HIPAA-compliant, ran synthetic tests live within hours, and replaced legacy tools with a single platform.
In healthcare, uptime affects patient experience and revenue. If your team is tired of hearing about outages from the front desk, I’d like to talk.
Our healthcare page and a short video are in the first comment.