Komplete System Integrators

Case Study

KOMPSYS delivers Life-Saving Communications for Leading Hospital

Background
Formed in a 1998 merger between Egleston Children's Health Care System and Scottish Rite Children's Medical Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHoA) has quickly become a nationally recognized leader in healthcare. Several factors have contributed to ongoing expansion at Children's, and all have elevated IT communications as a special priority. The hospital is consistently ranked among America’s top 10 children's hospitals and U.S. News & World Report rated it as one of the best hospitals for children in the country.

The hospital employs nearly 6000 medical professionals across two campuses and sixteen satellite locations. Both campuses are undergoing major expansions, including enlarged emergency rooms, increased diagnostic space and enhanced surgical facilities. After merging the networks, establishing standards and consolidating data centers, the next major challenge for CHoA was making voice communications consistent across all its locations.

Challenge
As could be expected, Children's telecom infrastructure was extremely fragmented. Each campus had a different private branch exchange (PBX) telephone switch with a separate set of telephone numbers. Complicating matters was the fact that its facilities are spread across Atlanta’s three area codes. With people constantly moving between locations, coordinating changes in phone service was difficult. For example, when the hospital needed to move its rehabilitation scheduling and billing office to the main administrative campus, the telecommunications staff worked with the local phone company to change all the telephone numbers or physically move the terminals, costing hours or even days of lost productivity.

Communications are the lifeblood of any service-driven organization, and one of Children’s primary concerns was maintaining voice-service availability. As a hospital, it could not afford for phones to be down. All three locations were managed by separate telephone service centers, and in the event of a central office failure, CHoA needed to ensure that all incoming calls would still be received. Children’s needed a telecom system that would deliver consistent service while providing resiliency in the event of a central office failure.

Solution
Children's faced a difficult decision. It could replace the PBXs with newer switches using the same technology, or gamble on a new technology solution that would provide more flexibility and (eventually) lower cost of ownership. KOMPSYS stepped in to help assess the telephony options and also served in several other capacities, including technical support for the deployment and operational support of the contact center. Ultimately, the experts at KOMPSYS opted to replace the legacy PBX systems with a comprehensive switching and routing service that offered built-in resiliency while extending call processing features to the campuses and remote locations.

Results
KOMPSYS installed a network to ensure all the hospital’s numbers began with the same area code and prefix (404-785-XXXX), radically improving communications for the 100,000 calls Children’s processes daily. CHoA now has one centralized point for voicemail, menus and management. Personnel can check voicemail over the Internet, listen to email messages by telephone and transfer calls to other staff members in different facilities. Personnel can easily initiate conference calls on demand, without using costly conferencing services.

The nurse triage call center handles approximately 40,000 calls per year, including everything from physician referrals to after-hours calls for pediatricians. Nearly 30 nurses work remotely through a DSL connection between the hospital network and their home phones. This allows them to access the same data as in-house staff, and when call volumes escalate, an administrator pages nurses at home who can be online to take calls in a matter of minutes. The option to telecommute offers tremendous flexibility as well as a strong recruiting and retention advantage.

Children’s also reduced its new construction costs: A traditional telecom installation uses hundreds of copper wires to be installed to connect the switches, riser cables and wiring closets. KOMPSYS’ new solution saved the hospital $250 per workspace by requiring only one set of wires and access to one router port. With strategic planning, KOMPSYS greatly improved communication capabilities and equipped Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to better fulfill its mission; providing quality care to those who need it most.

 

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta taps KompSys to lower costs and raise efficiency