Intelligent Communications Enhance Productivity

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Avaya

What does intelligent communications mean to a healthcareorganization? Quite simply, it is the result of embedding communicationsinside your work flow and processes. Leveraging thisintelligence means hospitals can use different communicationstools depending upon the particular user, environment or operationalrequirement. Today, intelligent communications enableshealthcare organizations of all sizes (from a local physician’s officeto a nationwide healthcare system) to deliver competitive advantagethrough improved organizational efficiency.

Perhaps more than any other industry, communications are critical to delivering high-quality care while controlling rising costs in an ever-increasingly competitive environment. Intelligent communications applications do not just improve operational efficiency; they drive increased growth of patient bases, improve profitability and allow you to build efficient and productive work flow processes.

Agile healthcare organizations view communications strategically; recent fundamental advances in telecommunications – such as IP telephony, unified communications, mobility solutions,Web services and service-oriented architecture – are providing revolutionary opportunities to increase mobility and operational readiness while simultaneously improving patient satisfaction and reducing the cost of delivering care. Leading healthcare organizations recognize that communications are more than a necessary utility or a cost of doing business. Instead they realize the strategic importance of intelligent communications.

What does intelligent communications mean to a healthcare organization? Quite simply, it is the result of embedding communications inside your work flow and processes. Leveraging this intelligence means hospitals can use different communications tools depending upon the particular user, environment or operational requirement. Today, intelligent communications enables healthcare organizations of all sizes (from a local physician’s office to a nationwide healthcare system) to deliver competitive advantage through improved organizational efficiency.

Optimizing Communications Flow

One important and basic aspect of efficiency is enabling communications from any location, fixed or mobile. Hospital environments typically include many devices, device types and disparate voice systems. In some cases, a combination of devices owned by either the hospital or third parties will need to be integrated with the latest IP-telephony technology and with legacy digital equipment. Intelligent communications combines the integration of legacy and new voice systems with mobile devices into one powerful overall communications infrastructure.

According to Forrester Research, 79 percent of healthcare organizations are rolling out new IT applications and services for employees with mobile devices[1] – nearly double the implementation rate of non-healthcare firms.

Case Study

Sierra View District Hospital of Porterville, Calif., Children’s Hospital Central California and Condell Medical Center of Libertyville, Ill., are three hospitals using enterprise mobility solutions to address the competing priorities of managing costs and improving service, allowing them to build efficiency into operations, improve responsiveness and free up staffers to spend more time with patients.

Speech Applications Improve Customer Service

Sierra View District Hospital, a California-based nonprofit community healthcare provider, has adopted a variety of mobility solutions for its executive and administrative teams. This includes Avaya Unified Communication Center with speech access, an application that lets staff manage business tools by calling a single number and speaking simple voice commands into a phone. Using speech, employees can listen to and compose emails, check and schedule appointments and reach contacts quickly and easily from any phone or mobile device.

Speech-enabling these capabilities can help healthcare workers who increasingly rely on mobile devices to manage a broad range of tasks. According to Forrester Research, 87 percent of doctors regularly use their mobile device to manage their contacts (including phone numbers and addresses), while 80 percent use them to keep calendars and appointments.[1]

Kevin Shimamoto, CIO for Sierra View, is one of the many staff members at his hospital benefiting from this application – helping him turn his one-hour commute to the office into productive work time.

“I dial into Avaya Unified Communication Center and am able to get all my voice and email messages read to me before I get to the office,” Shimamoto said. “I can use speech to dial vendors, reply to an email with a voice mail message or use speech to call someone back in response to a voice or email message. I can even record a note to myself that shows up in email when I arrive at the office.”

Hospital administrators are using speech applications to resolve problems quickly and make a positive impact on patient care. For example, if there is an issue in the Intensive Care Unit, a conference can be quickly convened with the head nurse, physician and the patient’s family – all by using speech-driven commands.

Another useful application for the Sierra View team is the Avaya Modular Messaging voice mail solution. This solution provides a “Reach Me/Follow Me” feature that improves responsiveness by allowing calls to be instantly forwarded to a worker’s cell phone or remote number. Audible caller ID name announcements allow users to decide if they want to take a call or route it back to voice mail – giving them the ability to prioritize and manage their communications wherever they go.

IP Wireless Telephones Free Nurses to Deliver Better Care

Children’s Hospital Central California is one of the largest pediatric facilities in the nation. In order to help its 1,000 nurses spend more time serving patients – and less time traveling back and forth to a central workstation – Children’s Hospital has equipped them with IP wireless telephones. This lets nurses make or receive calls as they move throughout the hospital, eliminating the need to return to a central workstation each time they need to contact a doctor, a colleague or a patient’s family member.

“Everything for us focuses on patient care,” said Joe Egan, telecom manager and network engineer for Children’s Hospital. “If we make an investment, it has to have a direct link to the quality of care we deliver. By using Avaya IP wireless telephones, our nurses can operate more efficiently and spend more time at a patient’s bedside.”

The hospital is able to create mobile work groups that can communicate on demand. This is achieved by combining the “push-to-talk” capabilities of Avaya IP wireless telephones with the ability to set a specific communication channel. As a result, teams of employees sharing the same channel can broadcast messages without dialing individual extensions. For example, a nurse can broadcast a request for assistance in moving a patient by pressing a button, eliminating the need to search for available team members, remember extensions or use the hospital’s paging system. Egan said the hospital is evaluating “push to talk” capabilities for emergency “code blue” calls to let nurses inform colleagues they are on the way – something that the one-way overhead paging system doesn’t currently allow.

Children’s Hospital also deploys Avaya IP Softphone, a mobility solution that delivers all of the functions of an office telephone on a desktop or laptop computer. The hospital provides medical coders and transcriptionists with the softphone, along with their own remote hospital extension, access to voice mail and conferencing capabilities, keeping them connected to the hospital’s daily operations even as they work from their home office.

Integrating Wireless IP Telephones and Nurse Call System for Ready Response

Condell Medical Center, an acute care facility near Chicago, has integrated Avaya IP wireless telephones with its existing nurse call system to improve responsiveness to patients.When a patient presses the call assistance button, a text message is automatically displayed on the attending nurse’s wireless handset. Nurses immediately know assistance is needed, no matter where they are in the hospital. Similarly, Condell staffers can send text messages to members of its environmental services team to let them know when a room needs to be cleaned or serviced.

According to Sue Mesmer, communications manager for Condell, IP wireless telephones with push-to-talk capability are proving especially useful for physicians, nurses and technicians in the emergency room, surgical department and other settings where rapid, easy-to-use communication is imperative. By broadcasting team alerts and getting immediate answers to potentially lifesaving questions with the press of a button, they are making a positive impact on patient care.

These world-class healthcare solutions are specifically designed to offer one seamlessly integrated answer to the communication and business challenges facing today's healthcare organizations. Other areas where Intelligent Communications impact the business of delivering high-quality care include disaster preparedness, business continuity and regulatory compliance. Examples of each are listed as well as presence and location-based productivity solutions currently under development.

Reaching Specialists Based on Proximity and Availability

Delivering a consistently high level of medical care is often a matter of having the right medical expert available in the right place at the right time. Consider the following emergency room scenario: An emergency room doctor is faced with a critical decision regarding patient care. The doctor accesses the “Find Specialist” service embedded in the network, which uses intelligent communications, presence capabilities and programmed rules to locate a specialist in another facility who is available for a videoconference consult. The result: better, faster decisions about care and a cost-effective use of an important specialty resource. A similar system is being used by a large Florida hospital to manage doctors on call. A nurse or other clinician who needs to reach a doctor simply dials a single number. Using intelligent communications, the system checks availability and connects the call to the next available doctor. The result is no more calling multiple numbers or enduring busy signals for the nurse, more flexibility for doctors and a faster response for patients.

Intelligent Communications Ensure Security, Business Continuity and Compliance With Regulatory Requirements

Networkwide collaboration capabilities inherent in intelligent communications also opens the door to new ways of supporting remote clinics – providing opportunities for sharing expertise and providing consultations, as well as training and continuing education. These capabilities also have an important role in business continuity planning, providing backup and continuing medical care in the event of any disruption. Hospitals can expand capacity and referral networks by reaching out to non-owned community physicians and, by using intelligent communications, can provide them with secure, virtual inside access to hospital communications systems and dialing plans.

Intelligent communications solutions can bring together a wide range of communications capabilities – from basic telephony, email, voice and instant messaging to customized mobility applications, self-service options and contact center solutions – to enable healthcare organizations of all kinds to deliver better care more cost-effectively by:

• Enhancing the accessibility of physicians;
• Empowering important medical personnel with productivityboosting communications; and
• Automating routine administrative matters.

Seamless Communications Across Locations

Moving between medical facilities can make communications difficult and prevent opportunities for cost-saving measures such as sharing receptionists and messaging systems. System administration is also more costly – you may need on-site system administration capabilities in each location. Intelligent communications make it possible to network systems located in different offices, share resources and manage the entire communication system from one location via a single Web browser interface.

Home-Based Work

Utilizing IP-based solutions makes it possible to equip a new generation of home-based employees – such as transcriptionists and night shift help desk workers – with the communications tools they need to support the health system.

For more information about mobility applications, visit: www.avaya.com/mobility. For more information about Avaya healthcare solutions, visit: www.avaya.com/healthcare.

Endnote

1. Forrester Business Technographics, April 2004, “North American Benchmark Study Usability Holds Back MD Handheld Usage,” Forrester Research, Inc., March 2005.