Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CallManager)

Sutter Health is a network of doctors, not-for-profit hospitals, and other healthcare service providers, serving more than 100 communities in Northern California. Efficient communications and effective collaboration play an important role in delivering personalized care that is both high quality and affordable across the health system.

Although most Sutter Health-affiliated facilities provided wireless phones to caregivers, their restricted range limited effective use. In addition, Sutter's Information Services (IS) team managed approximately 150 private branch exchange (PBX) systems across the network. Deployed in medical office buildings, acute care facilities, and administrative offices across five regions in Northern California, each PBX system had its own private rate interface (PRI), direct inward dial (DID) numbers, and dial plan. "We really struggled to keep the dial plan up-to-date, because each PBX system had to communicate with the others," says Phillip Askew, voice engineer for Sutter Health. "The complexity increased costs and made it difficult to troubleshoot and quickly resolve issues."

To enable more effective clinician collaboration and simplify management of multiple voice systems, Sutter Health investigated options for consolidating its dozens of different voice systems into a unified communications system with a central gatekeeper and a small number of aggregation points. Sutter Health also determined that the new unified communications system would have to interoperate with existing PBX systems to best support ongoing healthcare delivery through a region-by-region migration.

Sutter Health implemented Cisco^® Unified Communications. "Cisco's solutions support the more than 40,000 phones across our health system and enable our IS team to centrally administer a complex dial plan," says Kevin Sansom, network engineering supervisor at Sutter Health. "Cisco Unified Communications also interacts with a wide selection of related collaboration tools."

"As we gradually replace our current PBX systems, we're using the Cisco Unified Communications Manager as a gateway," says Sansom. "It simplifies our phone transition process by eliminating the need to update information in each location every time we add a new system."

In addition to a centralized Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster, Sutter Health has deployed the first of five regional clusters. A Cisco Unified Wireless Network provides pervasive coverage throughout the facilities in the first region, connecting approximately 5200 clinicians, nurses, and additional caregivers using wired and wireless Cisco Unified IP Phones.

Cisco TelePresence^® technology allows leaders and project teams across Sutter Health to collaborate face-to-face, in real time, without incurring travel time and costs. For example, Sutter's electronic health record implementation team uses Cisco's TelePresence on a daily basis to coordinate regional deployments. Three locations have Cisco TelePresence 3000 Systems, providing a boardroom-style table that seats up to six participants in each location. In addition, several hospital executives can join telepresence sessions from their offices, using personal Cisco TelePresence 500 Systems.

The telepresence technology shares the same dial plan as Sutter's other clusters. "Just pressing a button on the Cisco Unified IP Phone connects us to another telepresence room," says Sansom.

The Cisco Unified Communications solution assisted Sutter Health in its efforts to enable collaboration among clinical and professional staff, further improve the patient experience, and conserve resources.

Cisco's Unified Wireless IP Phone 7925 allows clinicians and other professional staff to place and receive calls from their usual phone number from any location in a facility, reducing time spent locating colleagues and managing voicemail.

"For example, a nurse requesting a gurney can use this technology to immediately connect with a porter instead of leaving a voicemail and waiting for a reply," says Sansom. "The solution helps us deliver care more quickly and effectively for our patients."

Sutter Health patients connect with caregivers located in individual facilities, not through a central contact center. To help Sutter Health provide a consistent experience for patients across its Northern California service area, the health system deployed a common voice interface. For example, a parent calling a pediatrician's office in San Francisco receives the same set of options as a parent in Modesto. Through Cisco Unified Communications solutions, Sutter further strengthens its patient-caregiver relationships and links patients with the very professional staff whom they see when visiting their local care centers.

Sutter Health further enhanced the patient experience with an improved check-in process, using Cisco Unified Wireless IP Phones 7925 and InformaCast software from Singlewire, a Cisco partner. After arriving, patients check in at a central registration area, and staff members notify the appropriate medical assistant on the assistant's wireless IP phone. As a result, typical waiting room times have decreased from about 20 minutes to no more than a few minutes.

The centralized Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster aggregated dozens of PBX systems and eliminated the need for separate voice networks. Instead, Sutter Health simply deploys a Cisco router at each site, so that voice traffic can travel over the existing IP network.

To continue enhancing the quality of patient care while reducing costs, Sutter Health plans to upgrade to Cisco Unified Communications Manager with session management capabilities in late 2011.

"The Cisco Unified Communications Manager session management technology dynamically learns about neighboring call clusters to even more efficiently route calls," says Sansom. "We anticipate a 50 percent reduction in our programming overhead when we add a new cluster." Additional savings may also result when the system's five regions electronically connect using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, which costs significantly less than the health system's existing PRI circuits.

To find out more about Cisco Unified Communications, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcommunications.

To find out more about Cisco Connected Health solutions, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/healthcare.

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