Northwest Eye Surgeons Improves Patient Care and Customer Service With New Avaya IP Office Solution

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - September 21, 2009) - Northwest Eye Surgeons, a premier eye surgical center headquartered in Seattle, selected Avaya's new small business IP communications solution -- Avaya IP Office Release 5 -- to improve the quality of their patient care and customer service.

Using Avaya's latest solution, Northwest Eye Surgeons gains access to a host of new communications capabilities that significantly boost employee responsiveness to both patients and colleagues. Advanced call routing lets the organization's doctors and administrative executives collaborate more efficiently with each other among six locations, including mission-critical surgical centers. Additionally, advanced resiliency features enable the organization to remain in operation 24/7, even during unexpected network disruptions. This helps keep surgeons and business managers accessible to callers at all times, keeping patient care running smoothly.

Northwest Eye Surgeons' staff includes 15 doctors that often travel between each of the organization's multiple buildings. To keep all of them prepared and seamlessly connected, the organization turned to an Avaya communications system that could match the sophisticated technology and mobility expectations associated with a top-tier medical outfit delivering round-the-clock patient care.

Before the company implemented Avaya IP Office, calls from doctors were mixed in with calls from patients, administrative staff and any other calls that came into the center. Now, with Avaya's call routing system in place, essential calls from doctors are expedited to other doctors and administrators so that emergencies and urgent requests are attended to more efficiently. With Avaya's help, Northwest Eye Surgeons overcame the complexity of connecting many doctors across many locations, enabling callers to reach the right doctors, and helping ensure that incoming calls flow easily between clinics.

Avaya IP Office's new resiliency features give Northwest Eye Surgeons a host of new business continuity benefits. A network outage could spell disaster for an organization with the responsibilities of a clinic and surgical center. For small businesses with multiple sites, Avaya IP Office Release 5 introduces new business continuity capabilities that use servers at alternate sites to keep an IP communications network -- including phones and voicemail -- operating in the event of an outage. If an outage occurs at a site, the system can now automatically re-register to another site's IP Office, eliminating the need to have two systems on a single site solely for continuity purposes. This allows companies such as Northwest Eye Surgeons to have a highly effective business continuity plan in place, without the extra hardware and labor costs.

"Avaya IP Office Release 5 helps our doctors get their questions answered quickly and efficiently anytime -- from any of our locations. It provides big company capabilities to our small business, and that new sophistication is helping us increase the quality of our care," said Liz Crane, IT manager of Northwest Eye Surgeons. "The advanced features of Avaya IP Office Release 5 help us reach and stay connected with each other and our patients to ensure quality care remains front and center."

Other Avaya IP Office capabilities used by Northwest Eye Surgeons include new "hot desking" capabilities, which allow their executives to move to any of the organizations' six locations and simply log into another deskphone to access their personal calls, voicemail, speed-dials and contacts. A hot desking employee can transparently receive customer calls while at the new location, just as if he was in his office.

"We often have employees traveling to other satellite offices, and IP Office's hot desking capability really delivers a higher degree of convenience and flexibility," added Crane. "It's a very important feature for our more mobile executives and another example of how Avaya IP Office enables small companies like us to gain big business communications -- but do so in an affordable way. We are a growing company, but we do not want our costs to grow with us."

The Avaya IP Office implementation was delivered by Cerium Networks, a member of the Avaya BusinessPartner program.

About Avaya

Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

Contact Information: Media Relations: Jonathan Varman 908-953-6432 jvarman@avaya.com