It seemed like an impossible task – pull 14 telephone systems together across 18 locations with a single user interface to more than 750 users, handle 200,000+ monthly calls, and enable a hospital's telecommunications team to remotely manage the entire system.
But it was done by Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.’s telecommunication systems division, and now Atlantic General Hospital has been able to connect its employees, doctors and patients with Toshiba's Strata CIX IP business telephone system.
Establishing a connection between providers and patients within a single hospital or between hospitals is so vital, as it allows providers to better coordinate care and retrieve data across a wide spectrum.
The new system not only hooked every employee together across 18 locations; it also reduced by 62 percent annual costs over the previous system and showed a 22 percent savings on local telephone charges, resulting in an anticipated return on investment over three years.
Atlantic General Hospital (AGH), a 62-bed community hospital in Berlin, MD, with more than 750 employees and 211 physicians, needed a way to keep everyone connected.
The hospital was looking for a system that could be, “standardized while still allowing customization for users and departments, letting the hospital have a mix of IP and digital telephones; disaster recovery and geographical survivability with failover support; expansion scalability; the ability to add systems, telephones and applications, as needed, and allowing the hospital to reduce overall cost of ownership by cutting costs for maintenance and software as well as local telephone services,” according to a press release.
The Toshiba system met the hospital's goal of 24/7 reliability, with redundancy and survivability solutions built in across the networked systems for back-up in case of a power outage.
Glenn Lebedz, director of Support Services for AGH, and his team really liked the fact that now the hospital can internally manage the entire telephone system using their desk or laptop computers virtually anywhere with an Internet connection, remotely adding to additions and changes as well as system-wide upgrades and other administrative tasks, for all 18 locations.
Edited by
Braden Becker
