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Who: Valley Radiologists, a large, full-service medical imaging center in Arizona. It has 10 locations and 45 radiologists, performs about 250,000 studies annually and plans to add locations and grow each year.

Before: The multiple locations were supported by a single call center. In 2004, its network infrastructure and telephone system were a mismatched amalgamation of several vendor products without consistent support, backup or easy internal communications. The radiologists did not have access to the most-up-to-date imaging technology, which compromised their ability to consult efficiently with referring physicians and left open the possibility that a referring physician could send cases to other radiology practices, resulting in lost revenue. As a result, prospective patients calling into the call center were sometimes dropped, and hold times could extend to beyond 10 minutes. More importantly, patient care was sometimes offered at below optimal levels because radiologists did not have the means to easily access images, and often had to travel to multiple locations to review cases.

"Radiologists provide an important service to the medical community," said Cisco Senior Medical Informatics Director Dr. Danny Sands, M.D. "Radiology practices must, therefore, provide superior customer service to referring physicians and streamline the efficiency of their operations to maintain viability. That is why it is imperative that radiology practices have access to solutions like Connected Imaging, which eliminates reliance on expensive and outdated resources like film, and makes it easier to collaborate with referring physicians and improve both customer service and patient care."

Valley Radiologists was also saddled with recurring maintenance and service contracts that cost them more than $150,000 per year due to the multiple vendors and the patched together nature of the telecommunications and network systems.

The Solution
Valley Radiologists realized that they needed a clinically based solution built on a solid and reliable infrastructure. For this they chose the Cisco Connected Imaging solution built on its safe and secure Medical-Grade Network. Connected Imaging delivers imaging as a service from the Medical-Grade Network using Cisco Unified Communications and advanced data center technologies.

Cisco Connected Imaging aligned with Philips iSite Picture Archive & Communication System (PACS) on the Valley Radiologists imaging solution. Together, Cisco and Philips helped Valley Radiologists eliminate film and render patient or physician geography a non-issue. This became the path to providing superior patient care while protecting privacy.

The Cisco Connected Imaging solution helps radiologists interpret image study and collaborate with referring physicians in real-time, facilitating rapid diagnosis and treatment of patients. It accelerated the elimination of the costs and delays associated with traditional film imaging.

"Valley Radiologists wanted to manage costs by improving patient workflow and staff overhead," says Todd Wingler, the Cisco Account Manager. "For Phase One, Valley built a data center that also housed a call center with 25 agents to centralize patient scheduling and workflow. For Phase 2, Valley purchased a Cisco Unified Communications and Connected Imaging solution. By connecting the imaging systems at the different sites, radiologists at multiple sites are able to balance their workload and collaborate more effectively.”

The Results: Cisco worked with its partner, local telecommunications vendor Qwest, on the Valley Radiologists core network as the company invested in a medical-grade network infrastructure upgrade that included new routers and new switches. "This phase helped us move three terabytes of data in May 2007 compared to traffic that measured in the hundreds of megabytes before the upgrade," Bennett says. "Our efficiency has increased by a factor of 10, and Cisco, Philips and Qwest were able to deliver an overall solution that has 99.99 percent uptime."

The new solution utilizing Cisco Contact Center Express helped improve customer service and led to greater job satisfaction with Valley Radiologists' staff. Efficiency has been increased, morale has improved and hold times have dropped from as high as seven minutes to nearly zero.

Precise measurement of patients lost due to outmoded equipment or lengthy waits in the call center are difficult, since many of those were never introduced in the practice. However, the measurable gains are impressive: Valley Radiologists was able to eliminate about $150,000 per year in recurring maintenance and service contract expenses and $60,000 annually in telephone-system related expense. According to Bennett, another major savings was that the new system "stopped the losses in terms of immeasurable business lost through dropped calls and some consultations that may not have occurred." New infrastructure and communications solutions paid for themselves within 14 months with just the measurable savings.

The deployment of the integrated Cisco solution has provided a mechanism through which Valley Radiologists has also been able to reassign at least three full-time equivalent positions as a result of increased clinical connectivity and reengineered workflow. "Our decision to deploy a Unified Communications solution practice-wide continues to provide value in our company's ability to rapidly deploy applications and tune image and information workflow to meet the needs of the business," Bennett says.

Who: With the concept of promoting public education, Kyobo Life Insurance was established in 1958, creating the first education insurance in the world. More recently, Kyobo Life has focused on quality management to maximize business value based on quality growth through customer services

Before: Since opening its first call center in 1998, the Kyobo Life Insurance Company felt the need for a more flexible solution; one that was capable of integrating diverse communication channels, including telephone, e-mail and fax, while effectively responding to the changing needs of customers. Company CEO, Shin Chang-jae, concluded that an IP-based contact center solution would provide the required scalability along with centralized management of distributed call centers across the country.

The Solution: When Kyobo Life was looking to centralize call center activities, it decided to use an IP-based contact center to consolidate five existing call centers into two call centers. Following a thorough benchmark test, Kyobo Life selected Avaya IP Contact Center. With an IP contact center, Kyobo Live would also be able to provide higher quality services to customers without disrupting current capabilities. With the first phase of construction completed, one existing center was rebuilt as a 427-seat, hybrid IP contact center, while the new center was a complete 250-seat, IP-based contact center. Kyobo Life also designed both centers to serve as redundant contact centers, where one will act as the back-up in case of system failure at the other, guaranteeing business continuity.

The Results: By integrating intranet, Internet and voice channels, and enhancing service speed through IP mapping, Kyobo Life expects its new IP contact center to generate considerable revenue. As Soon-ho Choi, System 1 Team Manager for Kyobo Life observed, "We are estimating that more than $9 million of net income will be generated over the next five years with the new IP contact center." He added, "However, that figure only covers income resulting from inbound calls. The amounts would be higher if we considered the potential income from outbound calls as well." Kyobo Life has additional plans for ongoing IP contact center growth such as integrating its existing contact centers and creating a consolidated 700-seat contact center. And into the future, the company anticipates further expansion to increase that contact center to 1,000 seats, which would make it the largest in Korea.

"We chose Avaya because we have trust in Avaya, which has the most abundant experience and know-how in the Korean call center market," said Choi. "Moreover, the Avaya solution was found to be superior to other competing solutions, as no call is abandoned during call congestion. This provides operational reliability with a redundant structure that enables instant back-up in case of server failure as well as best service routing (BSR) for a multisite contact center and various call center applications. He continued, "Another reason behind our decision to choose the Avaya solution was that we can move to an IP contact center while protecting our investment in the existing facilities," said Choi. "Since it has just been built, it is hard to determine, at this point, the exact effects of an IP contact center. We recognize that equipping a center with the most advanced devices or facilities alone cannot be the answer. What is more important is the effort to use the infrastructure more flexibly and more efficiently." He emphasized, "At Kyobo, we aim to continue developing our Avaya IP Contact Center solution to enhance our TCO and ROI, thereby driving customer satisfaction and generating added profits."

Kyobo's efforts are not going unnoticed. "People are paying keen attention to the results of the Kyobo IP contact center project since there have not been many cases of IP contact center implementation in Korea," noted Choi. "We are expecting that this project will be regarded as a successful introduction of an IP contact center."

One of the most important factors contributing to Kyobo Life's satisfaction was Avaya's end-to-end competency, which enabled successful first-phase completion of the IP contact center project without causing any disruptions. Kyobo Life was also impressed by the support it received from Locus, a local Avaya BusinessPartner.

"We are satisfied with the performance of Avaya and Locus. They were able to successfully complete the first phase of the project despite the tight schedule," said Choi. "Even though it is never an easy task, they also successfully integrated some unique applications for a life insurance company as well as multichannel applications." He added, "And considering the solution's excellent scalability, the Avaya IP solution will certainly help Kyobo to accomplish its ultimate goal of building an all IP contact center."

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