An exceptional phone experience is an important extension of patient care.
With this in mind, Stanford Health Care (SHC) is teaming up with University IT (UIT) to migrate the Stanford Health Care-ValleyCare (SHC-VC) locations in Pleasanton, Livermore, and Dublin to a new state-of-the-art phone system – similar to the one at the new Stanford Health Care Hospital.
The new communications platform will be powered by Cisco Unified Communications (UC).
“This upgrade not only provides SHC-VC patients and hospital staff with the same Stanford experience, it also generates cost savings from the reduction of circuits and long-distance charges. More importantly, the system provides advanced features and functionality to improve efficiency and increase productivity. That translates to better patient care,” said Ian Parker, director of Communication Technologies for SHC’s Technology and Digital Solutions (TDS) team.
A phased-in effort
The scope of the effort is significant because SHC-VC has multiple locations with more than 1,200 phones. And executing a telephony overhaul in a busy healthcare environment is always challenging.
The UIT Infrastructure team wanted to ensure that the impact of this project on patient care and hospital staff would be minimal. With that in mind, the team took special care during the planning stage and spent nearly a year designing, building, and testing the UC infrastructure at SHC-VC before starting the deployment.
Care, collaboration, and partnership
A pivotal milestone for the project occurred at the end of 2019. Over 1,200 ValleyCare phone numbers were successfully ported to Stanford’s new service provider – and, just as planned, there was no interruption to patient care.
Now that they’ve completed the Livermore project, the UIT team will focus on migrating the phones at Pleasanton and Dublin.
The telephone services that the UIT team is deploying at SHC-VC include
- new Voice over IP (VoIP) and analog phones,
- operator consoles,
- call handlers for efficient call routing,
- call center service,
- phone lines for Voalte nurse phones, and
- Video Medical Interpretation (VMI) service.
More about SHC-VC
In 2015, ValleyCare and Stanford Health Care partnered to become SHC-VC. Through highly skilled physicians, nurses and staff, and state-of-the-art technology, SHC-VC offers a wide range of health care services at its Livermore, Pleasanton, and Dublin medical facilities. For more information, visit www.valleycare.com.
