In the medical industry, a delay of just a few seconds can make a life or death difference. Hospitals and emergency response teams throughout the world require quick and efficient communication with callers, patients, doctors, nurses, ambulances, police, and all other ends of the emergency response channel. They require flexibility and speed in call routing, tools to manage and record calls, and the ability to handle hundreds of calls. It is critical that a hospital’s communication platform is easy-to-use, fast, and fail-proof. The network has to operate at the highest–level possible all the time. Notre Dame University Hospital in Lebanon needed to deploy a new, modern communication solution to improve communication throughout the hospital and the performance of their emergency response team.
They previously were using a limited and outdated analog network. The hospital needed to keep 130 patient rooms and 176 doctors easily connected. They needed to be able to fully customize their call-routing processes throughout the hospital, route calls as quickly as possible, handle more calls and dispatch emergency teams faster. They also needed to ensure that their network had failover options. The hospital analyzed many different high-end communication solutions from major vendors including Cisco, Avaya, and Panasonic, but in the end, chose a solution designed by Amik Online using Grandstream products.
The Solution
Two Grandstream UCM6510 IP PBXs anchor the solution designed by Amik online. These award-winning enterprise-grade IP PBXs support up to 2000 endpoints, 200 concurrent calls, and support the E1 cabling that is commonly used in the region. The UCM6510 anchored network currently handles almost 300 phones and over 700 daily calls via E1 and FXO gateways. One UCM6510 was installed as the primary device and a second UCM6510 was linked to it through Grandstream’s HA100 High Availability Connector to offer a secondary, backup IP PBX that could also allow the hospital to scale up its network.
The UCM6510 also offers the hospital a number of high-level features specifically for call centers that allow them to improve their performance. These features can be easily accessed and managed through the UCM’s web UI, and new call queues can quickly be added and edited through the Call Queue menu. In addition to basic Queue functions, the Call Queue functionality offers industry features such as a virtual queue, position announcements, switchboard, and call queue statistics. Amik Online deployed three of Grandstream’s GXW4248 FXS gateways in order to maintain the hospital's investment in 60 analog phones. These robust FXS gateways allow the hospital to use those analog phones on their new, more-powerful, cost-saving VoIP network. Each GXW4248 offers 48 FXS ports, while also offering numerous failover options as well.
For the new endpoints, Amik Online deployed 130 of Grandstream’s award-winning GXP series IP Phones, including the GXP2170 and GXP1625, along with the GXP2200 Extension Module. Though the UCM series is an open-source SIP PBX, using Grandstream IP phones with the UCM series adds a number of benefits. It makes setup, installation, and
ongoing management much quicker and easier thanks to its “zero-config” provisioning process, which can be done on-site or remotely. In order to ensure that doctors and managers could be reached anywhere, the free Grandstream Wave softphone app was installed on those employees’ mobile devices, which allows them to make and receive calls using their hospital phone lines on any Android or IOS device.
Easy Installation and Drastically Improved Performance
Notre Dame University Hospitals’ new communication solution was built in parallel to the outdated analog system they were replacing, which allowed Amik Online to simply migrate the lines and analog phones to the VoIP gateways when launched. This migration was done without any downtime. Thanks to Grandstream’s wide range of world-class VoIP solutions, Amik Online was able to build a fast, powerful, customizable, redundant network for Notre Dame University Hospital that has drastically improved the hospitals’ performance, response time, and effectiveness.