Healthcare Vertical Market

Healthcare Overview

Healthcare continues to be an industry that is under constant public, political, and financial pressure to

control or reduce costs, while simultaneously, providing improved services and access to advanced medical technologies and highly qualified personnel. Complicating matters, providers must ensure the confidentiality of their patients' records, even while patients themselves are demanding more access to medical information and their files. To survive and prosper in this climate, the healthcare industry requires a new generation of communications tools.

Providers need to deliver the best possible care toremain competitive. To enhance the quality of services, their medical staffs need to enter, access, and process information more effectively, spending less time on administrative tasks and more time on treating patients. Doctors and nurses must be able to find colleagues quickly and easily. They need to share information, and the systems they use to share information transactions must be familiar, simple to use, and not require them to find time, in their already challenging schedules, for long hours of training.

Patients also want a more pro-active voice intheir healthcare, and to be better informedabout health issues. They expect to easilycontact their caregivers for prompt attention.They demand options and want the convenienceof self-service options like prescriptionrenewal, appointment scheduling, billpayment, and referrals. They seek accessto their medical records and quick contactwith healthcare workers and insurersabout costs and payments.

Overlaying all aspects of day-to-day business in healthcare, is the mandated government requirement of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance. One of the major components of HIPAA requires healthcare providers to safeguard all data from unauthorized access within the organization, while enabling the sharing of information with physicians, pharmacies, insurers, and other caregivers. Communications systems used in today’s healthcare environment must facilitate and support HIPAA compliance.

The Issues

  • Controlling administrative costs: Do more, with less; creatively manage resources
  • Attracting and retaining physicians, medical groups and nursing staff to the organization
  • Efficient management of billing; insurance; collections; affiliated physician groups
  • Effective implementation of patient self-service options
  • Deliver a highquality patient experience and caregiver experience
  • Protect all critical data, while allowing quick access to information required by physicians, pharmacies, insurers and other caregivers

The Solution

Communité offers a cost effective, scalable, and fault-tolerant platform capable of supporting multiple applications critical to today’s healthcare environment, such as, voice mail, unified communications, self-service IVR and conferencing.

Unified messaging with universal inbox

  • Allows physicians and all medical and administrative staff, the freedom to access important information in a secured universal inbox. Messages and documents are sent and received in a controllable and confidential format.

Access anytime, from any device

  • Any device, such as a telephone, desktop PC, Web browser or any personal digital assistant (PDA) appliance may be used to access the message store. Allows Doctors and staff the ability to choose a preference of communications based on technology available at the time.

User status and presence management

  • Reduces time spent locating personnel or identifying on-call staff. Personal groups enable users to view other group members’ status and perform message broadcast. Directory search allows users to conduct searches for status and information about any user on the system.

Call control with call screening and rules-based call routing

  • Provides for 24 hour-a-day controlled access to physicians, nurses, staff, lab technicians and others that need to becontacted.

Find-me/Follow-me services

  • Automates the process to locate personnel in emergencies and provides an automated process to locate theappropriate staff resources when necessary. Communité offers another opportunity to provide access betweendoctor and patient for “live” communications in emergencies and critical care cases.

Fax services

  • Private information remains confidential in the universal in-box versus a public access device. Recipient can direct output to any device or machine. Fax information is easily shared among authorized personnel as file attachments to emails.

Message notification

  • Control when and how users are notified of messages received. E-mail notification may be generatedwhen new messages are received from specific, user-defined, individuals.Voicemail notification can be to anydevice—wireline phone, cell phone, PDA, e-mail, pagers, etc.).

Message Retrieval

  • Use any available device to retrieve messages – Phone, web browser, desktop computer, PDA, etc.
  • Listen to e-mail messages, using Text-to-Speech, from the telephoneuser interface. Hear the entire body of the email message or just play header information and subject.
  • Reply to a voicemail message with an email or reply to an email with a voice message.
  • Ability to move/manage messages via the medium accessible, at the time. For example: Urgent test information received via fax or email from the lab can be reviewed andthen, forwarded to required parties from your cell phone.

The Benefits

  • Cost effective migration path from several, single purpose platforms into a single solution offering Voice Mail, Unified Messaging, Unified Communications, IVR, Conferencing, and Wireless Solutions, one application at a time.
  • Integration with existing IT and Telephony infrastructure helps to control costs and streamline delivery of new capabilities.
  • Make it simple for all staff to share critical information with each other using whatever device is available. Minimize or eliminate re-training the end users by providing the same telephone user interface keystrokes that they already know.
  • Reduce administrativetime and lower maintenance costs by combining system administration into your existing LDAP Directory and Message Store.Off-the-shelf, industry standard servers can be added to existing contracts for other servers already in your network.
  • Easily design and add-on specific applications to meet the evolving self-service needs of patients and caregivers.
  • Highly scalable, fault-tolerant, standards-based, platform that provides redundancy,expandability, and investment protection now and in the future.