Improve Care

Patients have more healthcare choices than ever before, which means that to remain competitive and bolster their bottom lines, providers must deliver the best possible care. To offer superior services, they need to enhance how medical information is shared among staff and patients. They also must streamline administrative tasks and improve internal efficiencies by supporting emerging generations of healthcare applications and technologies.

For large healthcare organizations, these objectives are particularly challenging. They must support extensive medical services and larger, more distributed staffs, which demands robust communications systems that are reliable, versatile, and easy to manage.

Data
To improve services, healthcare enterprises must ensure that doctors and nurses can quickly access patient records, x-rays, test results, insurance forms, billing information, and medical research. They need to unify their facilities into seamless communications infrastructures, integrating disparate databases and systems. They must offer staff easy access to labs, pharmacies, insurance providers, medical devices, and other resources, empowering them to make faster and more informed decisions. They need to streamline administrative tasks to reduce errors and allow caregivers to spend more time treating patients. Providers must offer tele-radiology and videoconferencing so staff can rapidly collaborate with colleagues, regardless of their geographical dispersion, and access specialized procedures and expertise.

Voice
Telephony is vital to delivering high quality healthcare services. Phones must be available so medical staff and administrators can communicate with each other and with labs, clinics, and other facilities. Patients need to easily call their caregivers for diagnoses and scheduling. Yet, many healthcare providers rely on conventional voice services, which means each facility is an island with its own system. Moving and adding traditional phones is a time-consuming ordeal, and reaching personnel or forwarding messages among sites and departments is difficult. Healthcare providers require function-rich, enterprise-wide voice services that ensure medical personnel are accessible, even when working remotely.

Wireless
To improve healthcare services, caregivers must spend more time caring for patients and less time entering data and chasing down vital medical information. They need to deploy new tools like laptop computers, PDAs, and other handheld technologies that accelerate data entry and retrieval, thereby enhancing efficiencies. Whether bedside or in labs or offices, medical staffs require ubiquitous access to diagnostic data and test results. They must expedite administrative tasks and reduce paperwork, minimizing costly errors.