Health Information Exchange Featured Article

June 29, 2012

iCore Selected to Switch HealthCare Access Maryland's Antiquated Telephone System to Unified Communications



iCore Networks, a provider of hosted unified communications and cloud applications services, announced today that HealthCare Access Maryland has chosen the company to replace an aging phone and voicemail system with an Internet telephony solution to link more than 100,000 Baltimore residents to health care and vital community resources, in a safe, secure way through a variety of programs serving the city's uninsured and vulnerable citizens, according to a press release.

Unified communications are all forms of call and multimedia/cross-media message-management functions controlled by an individual user for business purposes, according to the International Engineering Consortium, as reported by techtarget.com. 

"Our mission is to advocate on the behalf of Baltimore's underserved, educate the public and link residents to care," said Rodney Matthews, director of support services, HealthCare Access Maryland, in the press release. "We were using a traditional PBX solution, which did not have any advanced features. The system was slow and we had to pay for licenses and smartnet services every year. We needed a more reliable, cost-effective way to communicate with our team and the community."

iCore's end-to-end voice and data system now allows HealthCare Access Maryland to use videoconferencing and iCore's web portal to manage its unified communications activities, and the application also supplies “built-in data center redundancy to protect against the growing threat of cyber-attacks as well as outages caused by natural and man-made disasters, which often cause system outages and downtime,” according to the press release.

And iCore's remote and mobile access capabilities will now allow HealthCare Access Maryland's team to stay in touch while outside the office.  

HealthCare Access Maryland announced in March a new public campaign centered on reaching vulnerable citizens without health care and women who may be eligible for new family planning benefits. According to a press release, HealthCare Access Maryland has been helping Baltimore’s citizens enroll in public health care coverage and navigate the complex health care system for more than 15 years.

Last year Maryland’s poverty rate hit 10.8 percent, the highest in 20 years, Jeffrey Benzing writes. Ironically, Maryland was also named the wealthiest state by the Census Bureau in December, “but pockets of suburban wealth conceal rural and urban poverty across the state,” Al Passarella, research and policy associate at Advocates for Children and Youth, told Benzing in an interview.




Edited by Juliana Kenny
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