SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 25, 2013) -
- Franciscan Alliance and Sisters of Charity implement Avaya solutions to evolve and succeed in new era of healthcare
- Avaya to spotlight latest innovations in telemedicine, healthcare mobility and proactive outreach technologies at HIMSS 2013 event, March 3 - 7 (Booth # 6846)
As new workplace demands transform the healthcare industry, more healthcare organizations are seeking innovative ways to streamline costs and processes, while enhancing patient experiences. This includes healthcare companies that have chosen Avaya collaboration solutions to overcome challenges such as the acceleration of Accountable Care Organization (ACO) models after healthcare legislation, and the need to address mobility and business continuity requirements in a new era of healthcare.
Avaya will be demonstrating solutions to meet these challenges at the 2013 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans, La. (Booth no. 6846). This includes advancements in healthcare mobility and proactive outreach -- and a new telemedicine solution with Avaya partner GlobalMed. Based on Scopia video collaboration technologies, this solution addresses the 'Rural Health' initiative and improves patient outcomes by enabling healthcare practitioners to visit patients at their home, and use videoconferencing devices and cloud workflow to collaborate and conduct exams with specialists in another location.
Healthcare Companies Evolving with Avaya Technology
Two healthcare organizations that have recently chosen Avaya collaboration solutions to evolve communications are Franciscan Alliance, a 13-hospital health system that includes clinics, home health services and doctors serving Indiana and Illinois, and Sisters of Charity Health System, owner of four hospitals in Ohio and South Carolina. The Avaya Connect channel partner for these implementations was Integration Partners.
Franciscan Alliance
The evolution of healthcare requires that organizations optimize health system performance. To address the challenges of enhancing patient experience of care, improving the health of populations and reducing the per capita cost of healthcare, Franciscan Alliance is simplifying and future-proofing their infrastructure with solutions from Avaya. Their Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) is reinforced with high-level security, QoS and disaster recovery capabilities, and was implemented with zero downtime -- a critical factor that keeps hospital operations seamless and uninterrupted when evolving communications needs. With this approach, Franciscan Alliance can decrease costs by reducing hardware and configuration needs, while driving affordability requirements.
Sisters of Charity
To ensure continuous support for advanced applications, Sisters of Charity turned to an Avaya Aura® SIP-based platform, gaining a strong foundation for evolving communications and collaboration in an ever-changing, highly regulated industry. Key applications range from "smart bed" capabilities that monitor health at a patient's bed to mobility features that address "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) needs for staff. These applications require an infrastructure that is open, flexible and highly-reliable, and which enables increased connectivity to various devices (e.g., fax, wireless devices, tablets, and smart beds). Sisters of Charity's network also enables support for Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, a HIPAA-compliant application that enables staff to consolidate communications such as nurse call alerts, critical result notifications, and stat requests onto their mobile device.
Future plans include connecting contact centers in three locations using Avaya Aura. This will drive redundancy and failover, and help families and suppliers gain continuous access to hospital staff, personnel and patients, even in the event of a network disruption.
Avaya Solutions at HIMSS 2013
Avaya will spotlight these healthcare collaboration solutions at the show:
- Avaya Telemedicine Solutions showcases a Telehealth solution with Avaya partner GlobalMed, which addresses the 'Rural Health' initiative to improve care in underserved communities. The solution combines GlobalMed's FDA-listed exam station with Avaya's Scopia video technology to enable face-to-face video interaction between a practitioner in a patient's home or remote clinic and a specialist at a primary site. High-quality exams and patient communications can be handled remotely, and captured images can be sent to primary sites with patient information embedded. This integrates into a health provider's device mobility strategy delivering real-time patient and provider collaboration.
- Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant enables staff to consolidate communications into one mobile device strategy using presence, voice and text capabilities -- ideal for nurses and staff on-the-go. This provides a fast way to integrate and deliver Meaningful use and other real-time patient data to an entire care team, while removing the constraints of hospital communications systems.
- Avaya Proactive Outreach for Healthcare uses technology to communication-enable patient and business processes that improve outcomes and help control costs. These solutions help by addressing processes around appointment reminders, resulting in lowered 'no-show' rates. It can also reduce preventable readmissions by proactively following up to improve outcomes.
Quotes:
"We're embarking on a journey to increase quality and decrease costs, and our entire infrastructure needs to serve all the challenges that come along with that. An Avaya network provides us the flexibility and reliability to support our rapidly evolving organization. We can speed delivery of medical images and other important high-bandwidth documents. Plus, implementations occur quickly, which is essential to a hospital's smooth operation. Avaya helped us lay out a vision, and it worked better than expected."
--Glenn Berryman, Director Infrastructure & Operations, Franciscan Alliance Information Services
"Avaya is one of the few organizations that can come in, listen to exactly what our needs are and develop a comprehensive solution for us. By providing our health system with a strong communications foundation, we can increase connectivity to various types of collaboration devices and prepare to meet increasing mobility requirements. This is achieved with redundancy capabilities and a streamlined communications approach, which gives us the flexibility to respond to regulatory shifts and changes without uprooting full systems."
--Paul Jones, Chief Technology Officer for Sisters of Charity
"We are excited to partner with Avaya as part of a collaborative effort to enhance telemedicine delivery and patient-doctor interaction. Avaya's premium-quality video, network and systems technology provides the necessary functionality that complements our integrated telemedicine solutions. Our collaboration with Avaya will enable our clients to achieve greater efficiencies in service delivery, improved clinical outcomes, and tangible value for healthcare providers."
--Joel E. Barthelemy, Founder and Managing Director of GlobalMed
Additional Information:
The number of patients with Accountable Care Organization arrangements with at least one payer is now between 37 and 43 million.1 (source: consulting firm Oliver Wyman)
1 Based on February 2013 report from consulting firm Oliver Wyman
Tags:
Avaya, unified communications, healthcare, healthcare IT, contact center, collaboration, telehealth, videoconferencing, GlobalMed
About Avaya:
Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.
About GlobalMed:
GlobalMed is the worldwide leader in the development and integration of the new generation of healthcare delivery systems, enabling lowered costs, increased access and continuity of care, and improved patient satisfaction. For more information, please visit www.globalmed.com.
Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Contact Information:
Media Inquiries:
Jonathan Varman
908-953-6432
jvarman@avaya.com