The Urban Health Plan ( www.urbanhealthplan.org) may not be a full-fledged hospital with an emergency room, but don’t tell that to lower-income residents of the South Bronx, who often make the clinic their first stop in any health scare.
“We do everything except surgery, other than a few minor procedures with podiatry. We’re outpatient care,” says Dan Figueras, both the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Urban Health.
Typical of many entrepreneurial or philanthropic operations, Figueras wears many hats. He describes this federally qualified health center as the front line for the neighborhood’s medical needs. For the most critical patients walking through Urban Health’s front doors, a reliable communications network can become a matter of life or death–as essential as water or electricity.
“We have defibrillators in case of heart attack, but we need to be able to call 911 to get an ambulance for the worst Code Blue patients,” says Figueras.
In spring 2006, Urban Health faced a communications 911 of its own, when its legacy phone network melted down just before the weekend. Luckily, Urban Health avoided disaster through a combination of fortunate timing, frenzied IT triage from a managed service provider called Traxi Technologies, and the right networking tools from Shore Tel ( www.shoretel.com).
Urban Health had already inked a deal with New York City-based Traxi ( www.traxitech.com) to migrate its four clinics to VoIP. As an authorized reseller, Traxi already possessed extensive knowledge deploying ShoreTel’s IP PBX technology. The deal came none too soon. Figueras describes the old phone network as a hodgepodge.
“We had four to five mismatched PBXs from different vendors and different series. Nothing was really talking to each other. The youngest piece of equipment was six years old,” says Figueras.
One Thursday morning, the legacy network died, leaving Urban Health with no phone service or overhead paging.
“We had to resort to calling doctors to Code Blue emergencies with the fire alarm,” says Figueras. He placed an emergency call to Traxi Chief Technology Officer Mike Fink, already in a prospective client meeting in New Jersey. Fink hurriedly delegated the meeting and raced across the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan to the Bronx.
“Luck was on our side because we already had our Shore Tel call center set up across the street from Urban Health’s main
building,” says Fink. “Using the clinic’s existing PRIs, we decided to retire the legacy system then and there.”
Traxi had deployed ShoreTel’s Shore Gear 120 series switch in the call center, as well as the ShoreGear-T1 interface to signal to the clinic’s PRIs.
The setup included the ShoreWare Director feature, which automatically discovers new switches and adds them to the Shore Tel system. This plug-and-play installation allowed a rapid response from Fink and Traxi.
By Thursday afternoon, six Traxi employees were laboring to design and deploy the dial plan “on the fly.” They were able to add new ports and users by simply connecting them to the network.
By Saturday, the Traxi team had used Shore Tel’s flexible architecture to set up more than 300 extensions, including Code Blue services. In just two days, Urban Health’s 320 staff members and 71 medical providers had reliable phone service again.
“And we still landed that new big client back in Jersey,” Fink brags.
For his part, Figueras says the clinic maintained its plain old telephone service during the redeployment, just in case of a 911 emergency.
“Now if one T1 line goes down, we have a lot of redundancy built into the system,” says Figueras.
Shore Tel’s single-view interface enables a global, multisite IP phone system to be managed from anywhere with very little effort. Traxi deployed the Shore Tel phone system to turn Urban Health’s four spread-out offices into a single campus.
The Shore Tel system is fully distributed with no single point of failure. Call control is distributed to intelligent gateways– called voice switches–and voice applications, including voice mail and automated attendant, run on standard server hardware from anywhere on an IP network.
Figueras says this makes records retrieval and conferencing that much easier for the clinic’s doctors.
“The doctors don’t care about the underlying technology in their phones,” he says, “But they do like being able to dial four digits to retrieve X-rays or confer with their colleagues.”
Figueras says Urban Health plans to open a new clinic in Queens. “Based on our experience, you can be sure a centralized call center from Shore Tel will be a part of that,” he says. V
Greg Tally can be reached at gtally@vonmag.com.
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