CORAL GABLES, FL – When hurricane season comes calling in a month or so, one Florida hospital system expects to have a cost-effective way of coordinating its telecommunications.
Baptist Health South Florida is moving to an in-house teleconferencing system. The six-hospital system achieved a quick return on its investment in the audio and Web conferencing solution from Tewksbury, Mass-based Sonexis.
The conferencing system has been in place for about a year, and the healthcare system recently renewed its contract with Sonexis. It’s eyeing the possible expansion of the number of PBX ports available for users to increase teleconferencing capacity, said Gilbert Albornoz, corporate director of network and telecommunication.
Before and during last year’s hurricane season, Baptist Health used Sonexis’ ConferenceManager system heavily. There was an average of 285 conferences a month, and use peaked in August when Hurricane Ernesto threatened the state, prompting a total of 436 conferences in the system’s hospitals.
The conferencing system worked well in crisis management because it enabled key staff to work on logistics from their offices while serving as a virtual command center during the crisis.
“Communication is very critical during a hurricane watch or warning, and this gives us a tool to operate in those situations,” Albornoz said.
Because the Sonexis product is hosted in-house, the system saved $8,000 to $9,000 a month on what had been spent on an outside service. Having the service in-house also reduced the complexity of setting up and administering conference calls, Albornoz said.
Because the service includes Web conferencing capabilities, it has opened up additional opportunities – for example, educational programming.
“We actually have programs and training that are carried out like virtual training,” Albornoz said.
The system has been a boon to the IT department, he added. “IT has a huge advantage with this because they can interact with many vendors that support applications,” he said. “Also, they can see demonstrations of a product without having to travel to a location.”
Use of the product continues a trend at Baptist Health, which is standardizing communication systems throughout the system. Facilities are migrating from older PBX systems to next-generation products from Siemens and moving to voice-over-IP to reduce telecommunication expenses.