Imagine: You’re a healthcare agent, caring for an elderly patient in the comfort of his or her own home. Suddenly, a situation arises where you need assistance from a co-worker back at the office. To your dismay, the office line is continuously busy and you don’t have access to your colleagues’ personal phone numbers.
A situation like this could be detrimental. For this reason, it’s of the utmost importance for those in the healthcare industry to have access to the most advanced methods of communication that today’ s phone technology has to offer.
If the employee in this hypothetical situation had access to a suite of unified communications (UC) features on his or her personal device that was directly connected to an office phone line, he or she could have seen the availabilities of colleagues to avoid calling lines that were unavailable. Additionally, the distressed employee could have also turned to a wealth of real-time communication options—like instant chat, for instance—to find other ways to connect with someone immediately.
Thankfully, Star2Star was able to help a real home healthcare agency prevent such situations by implementing a best-in-class scalable cloud communications solution.
Well Care Home Health, a Wilmington, North Carolina-based healthcare agency realized that in its line of business, communication can make all the difference – especially when a patient’s well-being is on the line. Their legacy phone system wasn’t providing enough support. With eight major locations and a total of 5,000 employees spanning the Southeastern section of the state, the agency realized its traditional PSTN-based system was failing to provide the advanced communications technology they needed. Well Care turned to Star2Star to solve its communication shortcomings.
The first order of business was to unify all of their business locations into one account, so that employees from every office could not only communicate internally more easily, but also so that employees from one location could manage calls from another office location. Centralizing communications means that no call will ever go unanswered and no customer will endure a lengthy hold time, as all hands are on deck and can help manage the queues even in disparate locations.
Additionally, Star2Star’s robust suite of UC features enables Well Care to communicate internally at much higher efficiency. Most notably the agency takes advantage of the system’s conference calling capabilities, which allow employees to communicate all at once no matter if they are working in the office or out in the field.
Another benefit afforded from Well Care’s transition to a scalable cloud communication solution was its mobile capability. Now, agents in the field can stay in touch with colleagues and accept forwarded calls to their personal device when they are not in the office. In this way, agents can provide better serve their patients by always being available at one phone number via the Find Me/Follow Me feature which transfers call made to an office phone to a mobile phone.
What’s more, the Star2Star cloud-based communications system makes scaling the phone system to new locations much simpler for the agency. With a traditional PBX, adding new phone lines to serve as a bridge between locations presented a huge cost center as well as unnecessary downtime. Now, if the agency wishes to expand to new locations it can simply do so internally by setting up the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager. Once that is up and running it will automatically connect with the other offices.
To find out more about how the healthcare agency augmented its business communications, read the full case study.
