Unified comms helps clinic cope with growth

With plans to open a second practice near its Melbourne location, Airlie Women’s Clinic replaced its existing phone system with a unified communications (UC) solution, to help improve efficiency and reduce costs.

With about 50,000 patients on file, the clinic provides preventative care, support for family health issues and counselling. Prior to opening the second facility, the clinic employed three receptionists, who together handled up to 800 calls per day using a 10-line traditional telephone service.

With the existing phone system, callers were regularly placed in lengthy queues, and the clinic was also experiencing line dropouts and lost calls after the caller was put on hold. On top of that, there was no effective reporting on the status of the system.

When management decided to open a second facility, the organisation was faced with providing telephony in the new premises. The clinic ultimately decided it wanted one communications system to work across the two facilities to improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

“Front-of-practice efficiency is critical in the delivery of high-quality patient care, and how you engage with people via the telephone is particularly important when a patient’s wellbeing is at stake,” says Robert Szwarcberg, Director of the Airlie Women’s Clinic.

After reviewing several options and working with telephony consultants Flexnet, the clinic selected a ShoreTel system comprising a Voice Switch, 19 IP265 phones, seven cordless headsets and several licences for ShoreTel UC software. This system offered the lowest TCO of the options the clinic examined.

Once the solution was operational, the workload on reception became so low that the clinic no longer needed three receptionists. As a result, management was able to reassign a receptionist to work directly with doctors to create more time for them to spend on direct patient care.

“Thanks to call management alone, ShoreTel is saving Airlie Women’s Clinic a minimum of 26 work hours per week; 75% of calls are answered within 30 seconds, and 90% of calls are answered within one minute,” Szwarcberg says.

This was a major improvement from the previous system, which placed calls in long queues creating patient service issues and burdening receptionists with many conflicting demands. With the new system, the clinic’s ISDN connection provides 20 incoming lines at a lower monthly cost than that of the previous system, which only offered 10 lines.

Each receptionist now has a two-monitor set-up, and uses a hands-free headset. With call management software on one monitor, receptionists answer incoming calls using the headsets and can view the activity of the entire phone system, including the number of calls being queued and which phones are busy.

The second monitor provides access to doctor schedules, current patient activity, waiting room status and patient details, so that appointments can be made during calls.