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Business Situation
Frederick Health, the largest healthcare provider in Frederick County, had a vision of providing world-class healthcare while maintaining their personal, community feel. However, due to the need for additional technology resources and an expanding, diverse workforce and community, certain enhances were required to their infrastructure.
Frederick Health wanted to make the patient experience faster, better, and more secure. For these reasons, it was decided that the certain improvements were needed to increase the efficiency of their internal and external communication processes.
Additionally, certain system-wide precautions were implemented in order to prevent unwanted security disruptions or intrusions. With thousands of users and patients coming and going every day, Frederick Health required a state-of-the-art security infrastructure and secure wireless points of entry.
“This project helped us realize our vision of offering world-class service and support by giving us greater internal efficiency and more frequent clear interaction with a growing number of patients.”
Todd Smoot | IT Director | Frederick Health
Our Solution
Thanks to an existing partner relationship with Core BTS, Frederick Health chose us to help expand and improve their capabilities. Through extensive discovery and design meetings – as well as with direct input from Cisco – we developed a strategy that included design, implementation, support, and regular updates of a secure and collaborative platform that could grow with them as their services grew.
Streamlined Call Center
We streamlined their entire voice environment by marrying their Nortel and Cisco voice systems. We also enhanced their licenses to produce better metrics (ex. time on-hold) as well as improved queue and wait times through their Unified Cisco Contact Center. Some of the other enhancements include call reporting, call monitoring, and training to improve the patient experience.
Secure Infrastructure
As their healthcare workforce and network grew, Frederick Health’s needed faster speeds, enhanced security, and compliance through network segmentation. We improved their overall security posture by implementing robust Cisco solutions around email, DNS, next-generation firewalls, dual authentication, and network visibility.
Webex for Physicians
Additionally, through our Cisco partnership, we secured 250 free Webex licenses for their doctors so they could reach their patients faster and enable telemedicine. This was essential during the pandemic to significantly improve communications between their doctors and patients.
Wireless for COVID-19 Testing Tent
With the build out for a stand-alone COVID-19 Testing Tent, we helped engineer outside wireless connectivity. This enabled users to register patients hundreds of yards away from the tent – creating faster and efficient throughput for COVID-19 Testing.
Upcoming Enhancements
Due to our partnerships with Cisco and Microsoft, we were able to give Frederick Health a full end-to-end view of the best solution for their dynamic needs. With Cisco voice and collaboration tools implemented, we will be integrating their Cisco voice solutions with Microsoft Teams and training their users on best practices.
The Results
Implementing a scalable collaborative platform helped Frederick Health realize their goals of expanding the technology solutions throughout its entire system. It gave them greater operational efficiency, more effective management reporting and review capabilities, and improved security for their entire collaboration system.
By creating a streamlined call center, Frederick Health was able to grow their customer service team from 65 agents to 135. And the platform’s efficiency improvements vastly improved customer satisfaction – shortening a long hold time to taking calls in less than a minute and reducing the abandonment rate to 2% and below.
Additional benefits include:
- Greatly improved physicians’ productivity
- Better patient experience
- Increased collaboration and security capabilities
- Reduced maintenance and support costs
Frederick Health
Frederick Health provides comprehensive healthcare services to residents of Frederick County, MD. Their Medical Group is a multi-specialty practice with more than 100 providers, 17 specialties, and multiple locations across the county. The system has several ambulatory care locations, the freestanding James M. Stockman Cancer Institute, two urgent care locations, and Frederick Health Village. With over 3,300 employees, Frederick Health provides a full spectrum of healthcare and wellness services to support its mission to positively impact the well-being of every individual in our community.