Health care is not a desk job. It involves being mobile – checking on patients, collaborating with colleagues, and running to the next appointment. Whether hospital, home health, or private practice, health care providers must be accessible, but not at the expense or personal privacy. Tango Networks Abrazo Unified Communications Solution delivers the only true mobile solution for health care providers.  See Mobile UC examples here.

Solution Description

Download Abrazo SMI Brochure for Healthcare here.

Flexible, Scalable and Affordable: Abrazo Meets the Diverse Needs of Healthcare Businesses

In addition to being an incredibly simple solution that improves the communication efficiency of health care providers and administrators, Tango Abrazo is a flexible solution that can support large campuses and multiple locations regardless of the mix of communications platforms in place today. It is scalable. Allowing a business to start small and expand as needed to support increased number of users or addition of new staff and facilities. And, finally, it is affordable. Using existing mobiles of any type and providing an option to new desk phone installations, the Abrazo UC helps reduce the communication costs of health care systems.

Examples:

Hospital Deployment:

Situation:

Large, campus hospital with extensive WLAN supporting mission critical biomedical systems including Wi-Fi enabled, multi-channel infusion pumps and remote patient monitoring tools. WLAN is currently dedicated to data and IT Department wants to continue to separate voice and data networks to ensure the highest QOS on each.

Requirement:

Integrated Mobile Voice Communication System with cellular service provided by Sprint PCS.

Solution:

To support the wireless strategy and to ensure completely reliable coverage Sprint deployed a distributed antenna system to separately support WLAN and voice.

Abrazo-E was deployed as part of the hospital’s communications network to extend desk phone functionality to mobile phones. Much of the hospital staff is very mobile and they tend to use both a mobile phone and a desk phone to stay in touch. By extending desk phone functionality to the mobile phone, employees in nursing, radiology, and other services such as the lab, respiratory, and housekeeping now carry only an Sprint Mobile Integrated (SMI) mobile phone powered by Abrazo, thus resulting in greater connectivity and fewer desk phones.

Immediate Impact:

Benefits to the hospital would be campus-wide and include:

• Significant improvement in clinical staff productivity
• Increased responsiveness and productivity by support service staff
• More effective communications between health care providers, their offices, patients, clinical staff and support services.
• Significant capital and expense savings for desk set avoidance.

Added Value:

The SMI Abrazo-powered mobile functions the same on campus and off and is therefore accessible beyond the boundaries of the hospital WLAN coverage. This is a major benefit to staff that move between the various hospital systems facilities.

Nurse Station

Situation:

When coming on duty, nurses pick up a mobile phone that is associated with a nurse station extension. The nurse will carry this mobile their entire shift. Calls to the nursing station will ring the desk extension and mobile simultaneously. Each nurse will have an assigned mobile phone during their shift. When away from the desk, a nurse can be reached using the mobile. If the nurse is unable to answer either the desk phone or mobile phone, then the PBX will roll the call over to the next nurse extension. This ensures the call gets through to someone at the designated nursing station.

Requirements:

• • Mobile integration with Hospital PBX
• • Simultaneous ringing
• • Sophisticated roll-over policy services

Solution:

This scenario is possible by deploying the Abrazo Unified Communications Solution. Abrazo is integrated with the hospital PBX/IP-PBX and the Nurse Call system to meet the needs of the medical facility.

Immediate Impact:

• Continuous nursing station coverage
• Simple to implement and simple to use by staff
• One number can be directed to multiple nurses

Hospital Business Continuity

Situation:

In the event a hospital PBX fails, essential communications will be disrupted. A transparent solution is required to ensure emergency calls get through.

Requirements:

• Backup system in case of PBX failure
• Simple to implement.

Solution:

Abrazo Unified Communications enables mobiles to act the same as desk phones and use the same number. Since the mobile network is completely separate from the hospital communications system, any failure locally does not impact the wireless network. Therefore, calls placed to a desk phone will not be impacted. Rather they will go the mobile phone assigned to that desk or person.

Immediate Impact:

Abrazo delivers tremendous benefit as a communications tool during normal business operations. However, during emergency situations, it becomes a necessity. Calls placed to doctors offices, nurse stations, or medical staff are automatically routed to the mobile device without the user or system administrators having to make any adjustments. Callers notice no difference while recipients benefit from not missing critical calls.

Small Community Hospital Use case

Situation:

Small community hospital with numerous facilities throughout state and with many professional service agents that provide in-home care, services, and follow-ups.

Requirements:

Hospital needs a low-cost, method to enable patients to call their health advisor using a hospital number and for the hospital number to be displayed at the patient’s home so they know who is calling. The hospital and employees are concerned about giving out personal cell phone numbers to patients.

Solution:

Abrazo UC deployed with the wireless carrier network and within the hospital enterprise network enables health advisor mobile phones to function the same as an internal office phone. This solution ensures one number is use to reach a patient’s health advisor and that when the health advisor calls back, the hospital number is displayed on the caller id.

Immediate Impact:

• Addresses need for one number access
• Addresses need for caller line id at patient’s home
• Helps ensure Health Advisors privacy

Added Value:

• Number Transfers: If a Health Advisor goes on leave, changes jobs, or quits, their hospital number can easily be assigned to a new health advisor so patients do not need to learn a new phone number.
• Unified Voice Mail: Solution integrates voice mail for health advisors so there is no need to check 2 voice mail accounts for business messages.
• Manage Liability: With unified voice mail, patient messages are all recorded in one location therefore can be accessed when and if necessary.
• Broadcast Messages: Mobile agents now have access to hospital broadcast voice mail messages that were previously only accessible at their office desk.
• Cost Control: the ability for the telecom manger to pull reports, assign Class of Service (COS) restrictions and gain tighter management controls of the wireless handsets assets.
• Cost Control: Calls from health advisors to other internal employees are routed over the lowest cost transport helping keep telecommunication costs down.

Behavioral Health Provider:

Situation:

A behavioral healthcare company has a large number of home-based workers. These remote workers handle many of the inbound calls from patients and are essential to helping prevent issues with these patients and in improving their daily quality of life. As a cost-cutting measure, VoIP soft phones were installed on each employee’s home computer. Unfortunately, the quality of the VoIP phones proved unacceptable, so another low cost solution is needed.

Requirements:

Low cost, high-quality communications solution to connect home based healthcare workers to primary company communications network ensuring calls can be routed to appropriate staff and that employee’s privacy is maintained.

Solution:

Installing a fixed mobile solution from Sprint powered by Abrazo UC. The Abrazo-powered solution enables the home based workers to be integrated into the main company PBX just like the in-office workers. Inbound and outbound calls will appear as if they are connecting to a normal desk phone, displaying company phone numbers to recipients.

Immediate Impact:

• The Abrazo-powered solution is less costly than installing “hard” VoIP phone to each home-based employee.
• Assigning numbers to employees is incredibly simple using the existing company dial plan.
• Employee personal numbers never need be released.
• Phone numbers can be reused or redeployed to new staff members when necessary without impacting patients.