IPcelerate.com

Customer: Galion Community Hospital

About the Customer

Galion Community Hospital is a full-service, 25-bed Critical Access Facility located in rural Ohio. In addition to offering standard medical care and hospitalization, the hospital includes a new state-of-the-art Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit, a new surgical center including four surgical suites, an extended care facility and physician offices. Galion Hospital’s mission is to improve the health and well being of those served, with a vision to be recognized for providing quality health care in a cost effective manner.

Initial Expectations from VoIP

Galion Community Hospital transitioned to VoIP in 2004, with a complete system overhaul in 2006 when they broke ground on their new surgical center. The hospital moved to an IP environment in order to save money and gain better control over their telephony infrastructure.

Addressing Primary Business Challenges

Galion Community Hospital needed a way to integrate their existing Dukane nurse call system into their new IP telephony environment, in order to improve their paging capabilities and options. The current system was integrated into the existing overhead paging system, but could not integrate with the new IP phones. The hospital did not want to install analog speakers into their new surgical center, and they also wanted to reduce the amount of hospital-wide paging occurrences. After exploring alternative solutions, Galion Community Hospital selected IPcelerate’s IPsession server because of its ability to integrate their IP infrastructure and nurse call system, and also because of the many additional compelling features already embedded in the IPsession server.

IPcelerate Solutions

Galion Community Hospital installed the IPsession server, along with software from Status Solutions, to create an interface between their existing technology and their new IP environment. With this new integration, a text-to-speech message is now sent to designated IP phones in the hospital and new surgical area whenever a Code Blue is initiated. In addition, the IPsession server provides a flexible paging solution for the entire hospital, allowing for overhead paging to existing speakers, as well as paging to individual or pre-designated groups of IP phones, simply by dialing an extension to make the page.

For the physician’s offices, IPcelerate’s streaming audio capability (i.musix) plays music through the IP phones, providing a calming atmosphere for patients and staff in the waiting and examining rooms. The physicians also use IPcelerate’s 911 Alert feature, which monitors the IP phones for any 911 emergency call made, and then sends alerts out to the other physicians’ office so they can respond to the situation with immediate assistance.

New Telephony Experience

After the system overhaul in 2006, Galion Community Hospital has been very happy with their IP telephony environment. The addition of IPcelerate solutions allowed them to seamlessly integrate old and new technology, allowing the hospital’s various departments to communicate and work together. The ability to reduce the number of overhead pages by sending pages and alerts to IP phones has created a quieter and calmer environment for the patients and staff, and has increased the immediacy of assistance during physician emergencies.

Next Steps/Higher Expectations

The next step for Galion Community Hospital is to deploy the Intercom solution. This is currently in the testing phase of their roll-out plan, and will be implemented first for the administrative department, and the employees in the area of the hospital would like to easily contact each other using this feature.