Philips Healthcare Picks Communications- as- a- Service to Keep Imaging Systems Up 24/7

When a hospital has expended the funds to purchase an expensive imaging system, time means money. And that also means they want the machine up and running 24/7.

The hospital imaging centers that purchase MRI and CAT scan systems from Philips (News - Alert) Healthcare always need to make the most of their investments by keeping downtime to a minimum, according to a recent statement. “Utilization of this equipment has always been critical,” said Erwin Thomas, senior director of the customer care solutions center for Philips Healthcare. “To ensure maximum use by these centers, we’ve made resolving their questions and problems a top priority.”

To make sure those systems never saw a second of downtime; Philips Healthcare opened a contact center at its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta with 400 engineers, radiation technologists, and nurses to field queries from imaging equipment users. At the time, the contact center was supported on-site.

But the senior director noted that the company's premise-based system had major limitations. “For instance, it limited the number of virtual engineers we could have available to callers at any one time. At peak times, we needed to have 200 clinicians accessible, but the system only allowed 64 of them in the queue," he said.

The premise-based system was also limited in its ability to manage multichannel interactions. “The bottom line was that our system was at the end of its life span and out-of-date,” said Thomas.

When the company decided to review its hosted contact center options, it knew it “needed multilevel call routing that went beyond just skill sets. We wanted to make routing customer-centric – for instance, we wanted to make sure some customers were always routed to the same engineer,” said Thomas.

Enter the cloud.

Philips Healthcare ultimately selected a Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution for multichannel routing and queuing, interactive voice response, unified messaging, and presence management.

Communications- as- a- Service (CaaS) is communications offered as an on-demand service over the Internet which allows users to avoid the expense of investing, building and managing their own systems, but rather, using the Internet.

For quite some time, healthcare organizations have avoided the cloud because of security and data integrity concerns. Gartner managing vice president, Ray Wagner has put the cloud, along with poor attack prevention, as the lone “tech-based” risk to enterprise IT, according to a story at healthdatamanagement.com. But the healthcare industry is beginning to feel a little more comfortable about cloud-based systems, now that private clouds that limit access to only authorized users can be deployed.

Philips Healthcare imaging devices now have phone-home capabilities that automatically alert customer service reps to technical problems, and the interactive intelligence quickly “gave us the ability to associate these phone-home alerts with a specific clinician for immediate routing. This has enabled us to more efficiently resolve potential equipment problems, thus increasing uptime for our imaging center customers,” Thomas added.

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