Dr. Jeremy Stueven is a medical doctor who is board-certified in Emergency Medicine, licensed in 26 states, and spent 11 years as an emergency room doctor. He was first introduced to telehealth in medical school, and since then has been a champion for digital and remote health. He now practices telehealth fulltime. He also works remotely as an International telehealth consultant, is a distant volunteer faculty member at the University of New Mexico Hospital, and advises venture capital groups in the healthcare space.

He and his family are also avid RV enthusiasts, and he enjoys travelling around the country, visiting national parks, and homeschooling his children. They seek to help others achieve this dream for their families through their social media brand, on Instagram @RVhomeschool, and fb.com/rvhomeschool and www.youtube.com/c/RVHomeschool.

Ensure rock-solid Internet connectivity for telehealth customers, despite underlying bandwidth and reliability issues, especially in rural areas

Providing state-of-the-art Internet connectivity for telehealth activities can be a difficult challenge, particularly when the underlying transports have bandwidth and/or reliability issues. Telehealth providers, especially in rural areas, have unique issues, such as maintaining critical communications that cannot afford interruptions. Even rural users relying on the new Starlink Satellite Internet experience frequent dropouts in their connectivity that can mean the difference between life and death.

Dr. Stueven also critically needed to avoid dropped calls. “We also needed failover internet. I can’t be on a call with a patient, especially a sick patient requiring a 911 call and have a drop. It’s imperative that I have a back-up and sometimes a back-up to a back-up.”

Mushroom Networks’ Next Generation Cognitive SD-WAN aggregating multiple broadband sources, including cellular, wired, and satellite internet.

“Mushroom Networks technology created fast, reliable and safe internet access for our country home and motorhome. By combining a Starlink with Mushroom Networks, we have the best technology. Starlink alone is not reliable enough, but faster than anything else available in the country or on the road. But we need the Mushroom Network Truffle device to provide a back-up VPN to allow mirrored traffic when the Starlink drops, which is a few times per day,” said Dr. Jeremy Stueven, Telehealth Physician.

For rural or on-the-road Internet users, connectivity continues to be a real issue. Cellular connections are great, but do not have the reliability or bandwidth needed for critical communications, such as telehealth. Satellite internet has become a new and attractive resource, but daily outages and fluctuating performance continues to plague the home market. Mushroom Networks SD-WAN solution enables intelligent management and orchestration of multiple, disparate WAN connections to optimize connectivity and ensure critical communications remain up at all times, no matter what.

The combined solution enhances the performance of the network and increases network reliability by dynamically steering packets based on advanced algorithms that learn and adapt depending on network conditions. This cognitive and adaptive approach to SD-WAN facilitates setting the networks on autopilot to work around and shield network problems without any human intervention.

Boost in WAN Performance:

Cognitive SD-WAN was used to aggregate together multiple WAN circuits. The overall WAN metrics improved both for mission-critical telehealth applications, as well as best-effort traffic. This provided better Internet service as well as excellent cloud-based services.

Boost in WAN Reliability:

Advanced VNFs implement sophisticated traffic management and WAN orchestration algorithms that are capable of intelligently responding to network problems and then routing around those issues, essentially resulting in a “self-healing” network – even in the case of complete satellite internet dropouts.

Network on autopilot:

Cognitive SD-WAN with broadband bonding also provides for specialized IP tunnels. This means that tunnels customized for the specific application at hand will fit your networking needs like a glove. As an example, VoIP Armor is a tunnel that optimizes VoIP/SIP traffic in the network to shield phone conversations against any network performance fluctuations and network outages. During an important telehealth VoIP call, the tunnel will seamlessly self-heal the on-going sessions, even when the main line goes down or experiences network problems.

Dr. Jeremy Stueven is a board-certified medical doctor who spent 11 years as an emergency room doctor and now practices telehealth full-time. He also works remotely as an International Telehealth Consultant, is a distant volunteer faculty member at the University of New Mexico Hospital, and advises venture capital groups in the healthcare space – all remotely. He and his family are also avid RV enthusiasts, and he enjoys travelling around the country, visiting national parks, and homeschooling his children.

His struggle with reliable broadband internet for his Telehealth practice and country home led him to Mushroom Networks. According to Dr. Stueven, “Telehealth requires broadband internet access of 25 Mbps or more to be adequate. We were getting 10-25 Mbps from multiple different, highly unreliable sources. The bonding created a more consistent internet stream. Once we installed the Mushroom Truffle, we had reliable and consistent access.”

Dr. Stueven continues, “We live in the country and have struggled with internet access for nearly a decade. The Truffle which we installed in our home was a huge success! We could finally use the internet with ease. We liked our home unit so much, that we invested in the Mushroom Networks Portabella travel unit for out motorhome as well. This allows us to aggregate multiple SIM cards and even campground WiFi, getting the best of all three.”

The SD-WAN solutions provided by Mushroom Networks allowed him to aggregate multiple broadband sources, including Starlink satellite, into a single, faster, more reliable Internet connection. Fluctuating performance on individual lines and even complete satellite dropouts, are seamlessly handled by the intelligent orchestration of the WAN links.

Dr. Stueven was extremely satisfied with the complete solution provided by Mushroom Networks. “Mushroom network delivered a faster, more reliable internet, which allowed use to accomplish our objectives.”