Coos County Family Health Services

Coos County Family Health Services (CCFHS) had its start in 1974 as a Title X Family Planning Agency. Now it is a full-service, non-profit corporation, providing family-centered care to people of all ages and incomes, with service users coming from more than 30 communities of New Hampshire’s Coos County and upper Grafton County and neighboring towns in Vermont and Maine.

“The ShoreTel system is much more intuitive than a regular telephone system, which means it’s a lot harder to make a mistake and maybe disconnect someone, which is unacceptable in our industry.”
— Gary Lamontagne, Hardware Support Specialist, CCFHS.

In March 2004, CCFHS had a number of different telephone systems, all of which it was rapidly outgrowing. Meanwhile, the organization was also in the midst of acquiring another medical practice. CCFHS wanted a system that would span all of its four locations throughout New Hampshire and allow employees the simplicity of four-digit dialing between locations. The organization began to investigate various VoIP phone systems, looking for a solution that offered easy management, integrated unified communications features, and workgroup capabilities.

“The best thing about the ShoreTel system is its ease of use and administration.”
— Gary Lamontagne, Hardware Support Specialist, CCFHS

In addition to valuing the cost-effective, easy-to-manage features of the ShoreTel system, CCFHS also appreciates the fact that it is now able to deal with one organization, ShoreTel’s local integration partner, for all of its LAN and WAN needs. ShoreTel provided CCFHS with eleven ShoreTel Voice Switches to use across its four locations. ShoreTel works with analog phones, so until budget and time allow, the organization can use analog phones at a considerable savings. The entire transition to the ShoreTel system, which was carried out in phases, took just over a week. Other benefits include:

• All staff are on the same unified phone and voicemail system, using four-digit dialing to reach each other regardless of location. Least-cost routing capabilities also allow the organization to minimize costs by avoiding toll charges.
• The system’s built-in suite of versatile, real-time tools — including telephony control, instant messaging (IM), integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^®, and collaboration services — frees doctors and staff alike to spend more time helping patients.
• With ShoreTel, CCFHS now utilizes a number of workgroups, including triage, front office, and women, infants, and children (WIC). Designed for operational efficiency, Workgroups help CCFHS get more out of existing resources.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity, enabling doctors and staff to communicate quickly and easily with each other regardless of their location.

“ShoreTel beat the competition on ease of administration, first and foremost. [With] one of the other IP telephony vendors everything had to be changed, including all of our switches, and the ongoing costs were going to be even higher. The other vendors simply were not able to offer everything that ShoreTel could offer.”
— Sally Wheeler, Director of Information Systems, CCFHS.