Visiting Nurse Association of Boston

The Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) of Boston is a non-profit, community-based, home healthcare agency committed to providing residents of Greater Boston and surrounding communities with care that will maximize their health, independence, and quality of life. One of the largest visiting nurse associations in the Northeast, providing nursing, rehabilitation, and home health aide services to nearly 15,000 patients each year, the Visiting Nurse Association of Boston is dedicated to providing quality home healthcare to patients regardless of illness, income, or insurance.

“Our core competence is providing care, not managing a telephone system. Ease of use and management was one of the factors that drove us to choose ShoreTel.”
— Fran Lorion, CIO, Visiting Nurses Association of Boston.

In early 2005, the VNA was using a Verizon Centrex telephone system, which proved to be unreliable and inflexible, delivered poor quality, and could not be managed in-house. Because of these performance and reliability issues, along with costs of a Verizon contract for voicemail boxes, the VNA decided to look for a high-quality system that was reliable, cost-effective, and easy to manage. The shortlist included Avaya, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, Nortel, and ShoreTel.

"With ShoreTel, our maintenance costs will go down substantially because we can do it ourselves in-house.”
— Fran Lorion, CIO, Visiting Nurses Association of Boston.

For its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to be managed in-house, the VNA chose ShoreTel. ShoreTel provided the VNA with a total of 14 ShoreTel Voice Switches across its four district office locations in Massachusetts: six ShoreTel T1s, six ShoreTel 120s, two ShoreTel 60s, and one ShoreTel 40. The deployment included 264 ShoreTel IP Phones and three voice mail servers with 525 mailboxes — sufficient for present needs, but with room to grow. Benefits include:

• Deployment took a mere two months across all four VNA locations. Maintenance costs were projected to go down substantially due to in-house system administration.
• ShoreTel’s open system integrates with the VNA’s in-house SQL patient information database; incoming calls are linked to the database, and can be routed quickly.
• Tight integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® lets employees quickly type in a name, bring up a number, and make calls from local online directories.
• ShoreTel Call Manager provides access to missed calls for improved productivity. Employees can look up call history and just click a button to return the call.
• ShoreTel’s Contact Center provides management and measurement tools to help ensure agents are delivering consistent service.

“With ShoreTel, information is automatically delivered to the screen along with all of the diagnoses and personnel associated with the patient [calling]. It translates to improved customer service as well as cost savings due to the time it saves receptionists.”
— Fran Lorion, CIO, Visiting Nurses Association of Boston.