Penobscot Community Health Care

Penobscot Community Health Care (PCHC) in Bangor, Maine is a non-profit organization governed by a board of volunteers. Since its incorporation in 1997, its mission has been to provide access to quality medical and dental care for all, regardless of their ability to pay. From 2002 to 2005, PCHC grew over 600 percent, going from a 40-employee organization to well over 250 employees.

“The flexibility of the ShoreTel system allows us to manage and meet the specific needs of each healthcare practice effectively and efficiently.”
— Doug Kingsbury, CIO, Penobscot Community Health Care.

While PCHC was happy with its Comdial PBX-based telephone system, it was not easy to scale to support the rapid growth. Faced with having to do piecemeal additions to grow the system, the organization determined it was time to look at new alternatives. PCHC wanted to begin integrating its telephony system with the network, including tying the phone system to a wireless network that allows doctors mobile access to patient information via handheld devices. 

“The management reporting capabilities of the ShoreTel system allow us to make instant changes to our system and alter how we do business on the fly.”
— Doug Kingsbury, CIO, Penobscot Community Health Care.

Placing priority on ease of installation, the ability to integrate with many different technologies, scalability, flexibility, and modularity, PCHC chose ShoreTel from a list of vendors that included Comdial and NEC. With the help of its Massachusetts-based integration partner, ShoreTel provided PCHC with a full-featured IP phone system, including nine ShoreTel 60 Voice Switches for the organization’s six locations throughout Maine, and more than 180 ShoreTel 530 IP Phones. The implementation in October 2005 took just three days. Other benefits include:

• PCHC organizes its providers into teams acting as small medical practices. ShoreTel Workgroups makes the creation and management of teams easy; reporting features allow PCHC to direct resources where they are most needed.
• Auto-attendant feature provides 24-hour automated call answering and routing for inbound callers, which is crucial for a healthcare organization.
• All PCHC employees are now on the same phone and voicemail system, using the integrated desktop tools of ShoreTel Call Manager — a powerful, all-purpose tool for managing their voice communications.
• ShoreTel Director, a browser-based management interface, allows access to the system from anywhere on the network and remote management of every site, including voicemail, automated attendant, and desktop applications.
• An open system, ShoreTel integrates seamlessly with business and CRM applications, expediting the organization’s plans to integrate its in-house patient databases in order to allow in-depth information to pop up as soon as a patient calls.

“We really liked the fact that ShoreTel was going to be easy to integrate into our existing system  and we wouldn’t have to rip out all of our equipment to accommodate the change.”
— Doug Kingsbury, CIO, Penobscot Community Health Care.