Healthcare

Hospitals are facing a crisis. Cost of healthcare is rising and there is a shortage of trained medical personnel. In fact, recent data shows that more than 72 percent of hospitals face a shortage of registered nurses. In order to deal with decreasing budgets and staffing shortages, effective communication is going to be essential to the productivity of healthcare providers’ existing staff.

Nurses and other caregivers have many communication devices at their disposal, such as wired and wireless telephones, PCs, PDAs, pagers, and several types of messaging systems, but still lack the ability to effectively reach each other in time-critical situations. In fact, Forrester Research estimates that message retrieval and attempted call backs consumes more than 30 minutes each day.

Smoothstone understands the communication challenges in the healthcare industry and their effect on patients and staff. Every minute nurses spend tracking and locating other caregivers reduces the time for patient care. Physicians also face challenges communicating with colleagues, in particular, inefficiencies in the process of communicating and exchanging patient information with specialists. In fact, a lack of communication is cited at the top root cause for all sentinel events including wrong-site surgery, medication errors and treatment delays, according to a Joint Commission Report, 2006.

Why Smoothstone?

By choosing Smoothstone, healthcare facilities can take the first step toward making their communications more effective and secure, interactions more valuable and staff more efficient.

Smoothstone’s Unified Communications offering is a complete way for patients, clinicians, families and other healthcare stakeholders to communicate through an integrated system of applications delivered over MPLS from a cloud-based platform. These applications allow for effective, collaborative, scalable, and secure communications, which lets people communicate from wherever they are.

Smoothstone lets clinicians and caregivers connect to the right resource the first time—using the most effective medium. Mobile phone and smart-phone users can coordinate conversations, collaborate with colleagues, and retrieve voicemail messages. Caregivers can see the present status of colleagues to determine their availability, and then securely view directory information to select the best method to reach them.

Smoothstone can:

• Improve outcomes and quality of care by enhancing communication capabilities and by enabling collaboration using video and rich media between clinicians, telemedicine, and on-demand language interpretation services
• Enhance operational effectiveness by improving staff productivity and workflow efficiency for processes such as nurse call systems and bed management
• Improve patient and staff satisfaction due to better overall management, faster response times, and service excellence

Customer Example

Client
A healthcare provider employing more than 2,500 employees in 185 single specialty, practice–based outpatient or ambulatory surgery centers located across the country.

Challenge
Like many healthcare providers, the client relied heavily on effective billing and data management. When they decided to deploy a software billing package to all their locations, they realized they needed more assistance than their small IT staff could provide. They wanted to work with a company that could not only provide data WAN services, but would allow the ability to migrate to managed voice services later as desired.

Solution
Smoothstone implemented a managed MPLS WAN with a Cisco–based network infrastructure.

Benefits
In order to help the company with their billing package delivery, Smoothstone quickly implemented our managed MPLS WAN to 12 select locations as requested. The remainder of the locations nationwide would be implemented in phases over the next three years. Additionally, Smoothstone´s solution gave the client a migration path that would allow them to layer managed voice services and other, on demand, enterprise applications as desired.