RMH transforms communications systems

The Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) is Melbourne’s oldest hospital, treating hundreds of thousands of patients each year. It was recognised as Australia’s busiest public hospital in the Commonwealth Government’s The State of Our Public Hospitals Report 2008 and, during that year alone, fielded a massive two million telephone calls. Given the reliance on its phone system, it needed to replace its ageing PABX, which was becoming ineffective and increasingly expensive to support.

As such, the RMH was experiencing increasing costs for maintenance and service of outdated equipment. The hospital needed a replacement system which would guarantee the round-the-clock reliability that it required as an acute care facility.

“The most important thing was zero downtime,” said Chief Technical Officer, Andrew Oldaker. “We are one of those industries that operates on a truly 24/7 timetable. Even organising a small outage of a few minutes is a major logistics exercise for us.”

The hospital’s main objective was to identify, and seamlessly migrate to, a new and highly-reliable telephony system. It wanted to move to an IP-based system for advanced call management features - especially call routing and organisation-wide voicemail - but overall its chief goal was reliability. It also wanted to maximise RMH’s existing infrastructure by doing staged upgrades as different parts of the organisation were renovated and as budget permitted.

“We wanted to move to VoIP over time, but we had budgetary constraints to consider,” said Oldaker.

The hospital decided a hybrid system which gave it TDM reliability while providing an upgrade path to IP telephony would be the answer.

Siemens’OpenPath approach, which allows organisations to transform their communications infrastructure at their own pace, was suited to RMH’s needs. Siemens’ experts helped the hospital design a more structured, effective migration path. OpenPath provides a number of more clearly defined routes that facilitate a smoother transformation according to technology requirements, financial considerations and business processes.

RMH elected to go with the Siemens HiPath 4000 solution because it offered the hybrid approach it was looking for and upgrade path to full unified communications. “We trusted Siemens and knew the product was good,” said Oldaker. “Their track record proved they could satisfy our key requirement - reliability. We’d had only three outages in over two decades which is quite an accomplishment.”

RMH also decided to invest in Siemens’ OpenScape Contact Center call routing platform, to achieve role-based routing and a migration path for centralised call handling across the organisation.

“The skills-based routing capability was a big benefit for us. It’s an efficient way to route calls, and in a medical environment, getting the call to the right person on the first attempt is an important KPI,” said Oldaker.

Siemens also rolled out its OpenStage phones for the areas of the hospital that were moving to the new platform. “This gave us the flexibility to move forward with IP-based telephony which we plan to deploy across the entire organisation in time,” said Oldaker.

Finally, RMH also chose Siemens’ unified messaging product OpenScape Xpressions, for organisation-wide voicemail.

The rollout of the new Siemens solution was completed in two stages. The first stage involved rolling out the new backbone infrastructure, including OpenScape Voice. The second phase was a smooth cutover of around 3,000 ends to the HiPath 4000.

The first ‘greenfields’ installation of HiPath 4000 coincided with a major expansion of the RMH Emergency Department from 30 to 100 cubicles. Oldaker explained: “When the Emergency Department moved to its new location, we rolled out 70 fixed line and 10 DECT handsets. The rollout went without a hitch - it worked straight out of the box.”

The changeover to the new system achieved its key goals by offering a smooth transition and ensuring continuity of service. “Business continuity has been a key driver. At the end of the day, our users just want to pick up the handset and hear a dial tone,” said Oldaker.