Businesses with multiple sites face the burden of having to keep all of their staff in communication with each other. This usually is done through private branch exchanges (PBX (News - Alert)) and other solutions that usually impose significant costs and further burden companies. In the healthcare industry, communication is essential not only for administrative purposes, but also to connect practitioners to specialists when they need more information that could help a patient.
A healthcare organization in the U.S. Known as St. Elizabeth Physicians (SEP), has recently gone through adoption of VoIP at 77 of its locations. This usually would be unimportant, except for the fact that this serves as an example of what some larger organizations can do to streamline communications at a lower cost. One of the biggest selling points of VoIP is its affordability and the convenience it can provide by all but eliminating the administrative burdens an organization.
On-premises telecommunications solutions for organizations the scale of SEP would normally be cost-prohibitive and would hamper its sustainability in the long run with the need for continual large-scale hardware upgrades and maintenance. Sticking to analog communications, on the other hand, would also incur high costs, since providers are unwilling to present options that fit their needs to scale other than a flat per-minute rate.
Fortunately, Since VoIP can be hosted remotely, SEP does not need to worry about these problems. The lack of on-site hardware presents a viable solution to problems that it would otherwise have encountered by going with other alternatives. IP-based communications can operate in their entirety on the cloud and work on current IT infrastructures as needed. VoIP is scalable, affordable, convenient, and gives healthcare organizations one less thing to worry about and more time to focus on providing health to their patients.
Edited by Blaise McNamee