RehabCare

RehabCare is a leading provider of physical rehabilitation program management services, offering skilled nursing care, consulting, billing services, and therapy/staffing solutions for both short-stay and long-term care. With more than 1,250 hospitals and skilled nursing facilities across 42 states, providing an effective continuum of care not only means using the latest treatment technologies, but also going above and beyond to deliver personalized, reassuring care to help patients regain their lives.           

“Our goal is to use IT to help provide better care for patients, and a better working environment for our healthcare providers so we can attract and retain the nation’s top rehabilitation specialists.”
-Jim O’Brien, Director of Technical Services, RehabCare. 

RehabCare needs a communications infrastructure that helps it stay connected with patients, even after staff have gone home, and puts the right data in the right hands at the right time. As the organization continued to grow and open its own hospitals, the previous NEC phone system couldn’t scale to keep up, or incorporate any new call center features. Outages were threatening RehabCare’s ability to do business, and support costs were soaring, tying up valuable resources on what should be routine tasks. It was time for the IT team to take a close look at unified communications and how the company might take advantage of a distributed model — its own cloud computing — to ensure rapid response and tight collaboration.

“Patients need the comfort and reassurance of being able to reach a live person right away. For patient safety and satisfaction, missed or dropped calls are not an option.”
-Jim O’Brien, Director of Technical Services, RehabCare. 

Since the ShoreTel UC system easily integrates with legacy systems, RehabCare planned a phased deployment across its locations as time and budget permitted. The initial ShoreTel deployment of 450 ShoreTel IP Phones began in the corporate offices, with eight ShoreTel 90 Voice Switches, five ShoreTel T1 gateways, and several analog voice switches with N+1 redundancy capabilities for reliability. ShoreTel was the only company to support the organization’s many analog devices with just one piece of equipment and no special gateways. Other benefits include:

• Cost savings of almost $3,000 each month at the corporate office alone. Huge time savings as the system’s ease of management no longer requires senior IT staff resources.
• Highly reliable and scalable distributed architecture supports cloud computing goals.
• Flexible mobile and remote worker options provide easily configurable access to communications on the road or at home with mobile devices, softphones, and VPNs.
• Efficiency-enhancing features in ShoreTel Call Manager enable rehabilitation specialists who regularly go above the call of duty to stay in touch with patients, even after the specialists have returned home.
• N+1 redundancy enables RehabCare to achieve affordable high availability and implement an important disaster recovery plan.

“We have yet to receive a single problem call about ShoreTel — the deployment has been one of the most visible projects that IT has completed. It touched every desk, producing a huge win for the IT department and a positive impact on the business.”
- Jim O'Brien, Director of Technical Services, RehabCare.