Reduce Costs

All healthcare providers today must reduce their costs to make services more affordable and to sustain profitability. But for mid-size hospitals and medical organizations, the challenge is particularly daunting. They must trim expenses and enhance productivity while competing against larger providers with more resources. To improve their bottom lines, they require practical, cost-effective communications that streamline their processes, bolster efficiencies, and enhance the quality and timeliness of their services.

Data
To boost productivity and lower expenses, healthcare providers need reliable, high-speed networking equipment throughout the enterprise. These systems must enable caregivers to improve care by rapidly capturing and sharing data, exchanging large medical files, and deploying timesaving technologies. To lower administrative costs, providers need to enhance back-office processing and accelerate transactions with insurers, vendors, and patients. They must decrease paperwork to reduce costly errors caused by repetitive data entry or poor handwriting. Moreover, they need to extend connectivity to all distributed clinics and offices, offering services like telemedicine to share expertise and care with remote sites.

Lacking the resources of larger competitors, however, medium-size providers must deliver medical applications and data without high deployment or ownership costs. They require networking systems that are reliable and resilient to avoid costly disruptions of services. These solutions must scale cost-effectively to keep pace with growth and offer simple management to conserve limited IT budgets.

Voice
Caregivers rely on telephony to communicate with patients, staff, and each other, but conventional voice solutions like PBX systems drain operating budgets. They are difficult to manage, and demand high-priced service technicians for even such simple tasks as adding, moving, or changing phones. They lack the flexibility to adapt to the evolving healthcare workplace and are expensive to expand. Toll charges between sites quickly add up and features that enhance patient services and productivity, like call centers and integrated communications, are costly, if available at all. For many vendors' platforms, even voice mail is an expensive add-on.

Instead, mid-size healthcare providers need voice solutions that deliver function-rich, enterprise-wide communications affordably and efficiently. These systems must be simple to manage and use, reducing the time and budget needed for staff training.

Wireless
Hospitals and other medical organizations must be able to deploy new networks or expand existing systems without considerable cost. Installing cabling, however, is an expensive and often impractical burden. Additionally, to improve care and reduce paperwork, medical staffs are increasingly relying on laptop computers, PDAs, and other handheld devices, demanding untethered connectivity from bedsides and clinics to offices and laboratories. To meet these needs, healthcare providers can turn to wireless systems for highly flexible and cost-effective networking solutions.