Hollywood unifies voice communications

Perth’s Hollywood Private Hospital, which is part of Ramsay Health Care, has deployed a new healthcare voice communications solution from Nortel that allows it to retain existing phones while adding modern call functionality and providing an easy upgrade to unified communications.

The hospital wanted to enhance the long-term reliability of its voice system, without sacrificing current investments in handsets and cabling, with a solution that would support future technology, without requiring additional equipment. Nortel’s solution provided the doctors and patients with call functionality and added capabilities they didn’t have before, like voicemail and unified messaging for remote retrieval of important messages to enable more rapid response.

Located in the Perth suburb of Nedlands in Western Australia, Hollywood Private Hospital is a private teaching hospital recognised as a centre for excellence in surgery, medicine, psychiatric care, rehabilitation and palliative care. It is currently undergoing a $128.5 million dollar redevelopment of its facilities and services to ensure they remain one of the largest and most modern private hospitals in Australia.

“As a teaching hospital, we rely on our communications infrastructure to properly support and assist our interns, while providing quality healthcare for our patients,” says Richard Jackson, IT service manager, Western Australia, Ramsay Health Care. “At the same time, we’re working in a competitive, budget-conscious industry, so we’re careful about investing in technology that gives us the features we need at the right price.

“We were very clear on what we required from a new voice system and our long-term supplier PABX Service Group Western Meridian worked together with Nortel to deliver a solution on spec,” Jackson said. “We’re also in the process of building a new extension to the hospital and we didn’t want the expense of refitting our existing facilities with IP phones. The Nortel solution gave us the option to extend our current network investments while providing a foundation for easily expanding our services with new technology further down the line.”

Ric Seeto, VP, Enterprise Solutions, Australia and New Zealand, Nortel said, “Many organisations are daunted by the prospect of replacing their existing communications systems with new technology, even though they can appreciate the benefits that IP telephony and unified communications will bring to their business.

“Nortel supports integrating legacy and new technology on the same platform as an approach that makes business sense to most Australian organisations, especially in healthcare where equipment investments run into millions of dollars,” Seeto said.

“Giving customers like Hollywood Hospital the choice of using their existing phones, while building a platform that supports gradual migration to new technology, also means they can fit the technology to their business growth rather than investing in technology they might never use.”