“We saved a half-a-million dollars upfront on capital expenditure”
Hospital communications are essential for the smooth running of the medical facility and to ensure patients have comfortable stays. Typically, budgets are constrained and the nature of the environment means that requirements change on a daily basis as patient needs result in relocation and the re-allocation of space and equipment for different functions. This was the case at Mizell Memorial Hospital, which has served the city of Opp in Alabama, USA, for more than 70 years.
Having grown steadily since initial construction with the addition of new wings, specialist units, a wellness centre, a primary care clinic in Opp and a new clinic in nearby Elba, the hospital now has more than 200 employees. This growth has placed significant pressure on the hospital’s telecoms infrastructure, operating at maximum capacity for several years.
“Much of the wiring in the walls was as old as the building, and the phone server was at the end of its life,” explains Blake Thomason, the Network Administrator for Mizell Memorial Hospital. “We had less than 1,000 extensions, and everything on the existing phone system used so many of them. We were really limited in what we could do. If we needed a phone over here, we had to take a phone from over there and hope that we could free up an IP licence to make it all work.”
The need to renovate and replace the hospital’s ageing infrastructure was clear, but as a non-profit organisation, the hospital needed to ensure costs were controlled. It also wanted to put a system in place that would allow for continued expansion beyond its current number of extensions. The company turned to NEC, which it has been a customer of since the early 1990s, and NEC Channel Partner VENSEARCH to find a solution to match its needs.
The hospital chose NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT cloud-based phone system because of its attractive feature set, low cost and the ability to scale up on demand. UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT includes chat, text messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing and file management, all of which are delivered through intuitive desktop and mobile apps. The hospital was able to implement the new system with 174 initial users in just 30 days in spite of the complexity and size of the hospital.
The UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT mobile app has proven its value and was an important selling point for the solution. It provides a platform for the hospital’s nursing staff to communicate safely and securely with on-call physicians through in-app messaging, which has delivered substantial benefits.
“It has also allowed our managers, administrators and physicians to be even more responsive to their staff and patients,” adds Thomason. “They can get a call, voicemail or email through the mobile app and, depending on their subscription, they can also get a transcript of their voicemails without being at their desk. I’m surprised by the number of people who have downloaded and set up the UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT apps on their phones and computers and didn’t call IT for help. That’s a milestone in itself.”
“UNIVERGE BLUE has allowed our managers, administrators and physicians to be even more responsive to their staff and patients”
Uptake of the app plus the flexibility of the system has achieved Mizell Memorial Hospital’s communications goals, and a further success has been the solution’s cost efficiency. By eliminating all its former phone lines and SIP trunks except the two hard lines required for its state regulation-compliant fire system, 85-90% of the UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT user subscription costs have been covered. “Combine that with the cost avoidance of not having to rewire the entire hospital and you just can’t argue
