Doctors Hospital at Renaissance

Morphing from a single outpatient surgical center in 1997 to a comprehensive network of services, Doctors Hospital is an eight-center facility providing a wide range of acute care, diagnostic, and surgical departments, and progressive medical treatment and imaging centers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. With a mission to deliver quality, compassionate, and cost-effective patient care through its state-of-the-art facilities, Doctors Hospital has grown nearly ten-fold in the last decade.

“With pressure to provide top-notch patient care while controlling costs, the hospital needed to boost the availability, mobility, and capabilities of its communications infrastructure. We needed a vendor who would do more than rip and replace our phones and who truly understands how critical the right voice over IP (VoIP) network is to the way we work.”
— Robert Acosta, Director of Technology Services and Security, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.

The existing campus relied on a legacy Nortel PBX system, which could not be expanded to meet the hospital’s long-term needs. With the pending completion of several new facilities, a telecom infrastructure was needed to connect the separate campuses and ensure transparent failover in the event of a power outage or other failure. The hospital also wanted to migrate antiquated technologies — analog telephones in patient rooms, fax machines at nurses’ stations, and paper lists of telephone extensions for PBX operators — into digital formats that could be integrated and shared across facilities to improve productivity and service.

 “I didn’t want to have our system dependent upon the expertise of a network manager, and the ShoreTel solution seemed extremely easy to use without special knowledge or support.”
— Robert Acosta, Director of Technology Services and Security, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.

Following a pilot with 25 ShoreTel telephones, it was clear just how well the system’s distributed architecture integrated with existing PBX systems and business applications. The hospital’s new unified communication system comprises more than 900 ShoreTel IP Phones, ShoreTel Voice Switches, ShoreTel Director for Web-based management, and ShoreTel Call Manager integrated with Microsoft^® Outlook^® for desktop users. The hospital will eventually convert all users from Nortel to ShoreTel as time and budgets permit, for a total of 2600 users. Other benefits include:

• While doubling capacity, the new system enabled savings of $36,000 per year in long-distance telephone charges, as well as a lower total cost of ownership.
• The distributed, switch-based architecture gives the hospital reliable, integrated UC capabilities beyond traditional PBX systems to include voice, video, data, and mobile systems that support 24/7 healthcare.
• Medical staff quickly improved productivity due to the system’s ease of use, and the IT staff has deployed nine installations without outside resources.
• ShoreTel Call Manager has streamlined the archaic paper protocols so that PBX operators can type in the first few characters of a name to identify patient rooms or departments, and quickly transfer calls correctly in seconds, rather than minutes.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity across as many sites as needed, and can be managed from anywhere on the network with the Web-based interface of ShoreTel Director.

“When it comes to curing our communication ills, ShoreTel truly was the best medicine.”
— Robert Acosta, Director of Technology Services and Security, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.