Avaya at HIMSS 2011: Business Communications Leader Spotlights New Mobility and Automated Outreach Capabilities That Improve Healthcare Processes

HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, Orlando, Fla., – Avaya, Inc., a global leader in business collaboration systems, software and services, announced new and enhanced communications solutions to help healthcare providers improve workplace collaboration and patient care. The solutions–to be demonstrated at the 2011 Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition–use mobility, automated outreach and other technologies to enhance care coordination, pre-admissions preparedness, and post-discharge care.

“Healthcare professionals need to be instantly reachable and quick to respond in order to deliver the most effective care,” said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya’s Healthcare Solutions group. “Avaya’s solutions help speed up hospital clinical processes, and remove the barriers that can frustrate healthcare professionals. The tools we are showcasing today streamline communications in an industry where every second counts.”

Innovative technologies will continue to play a central role in healthcare in 2011. Gartner estimates that “in 2011 healthcare providers worldwide will spend $87.7 billion on IT, including hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications.”(1)

Avaya will showcase its solutions in booth #2718 at the 2011 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition. This includes the new offerings:
Avaya Mobile Device Checkout 3.0: This frees hospital staff from the nurse’s station by enabling communications from anywhere on hospital grounds using a personalized Wireless LAN mobile device. With this solution, a hospital worker registers a shared or personal mobile device at the start of a shift by swiping the barcode on their device and ID badge. This assigns a personal phone number to the device, eliminating complex login procedures or the need for staff to get a new contact number at work. The solution also allows simultaneous log in to applications, such as asset management.

With this solution, Avaya addresses the issues of healthcare
staff availability and collaboration. According to a recent
Spyglass Consulting Group report, 69 percent of hospital-based
physicians and 87 percent of private practice physicians indicate
their biggest communications challenge is connecting with
colleagues in a timely manner.

Today’s update builds on a prior release by expanding
support  beyond hospital WLAN devices to now integrate with other
smart phones and wireless tablets, including iPhones, Blackberrys
and iPads. Enhanced reporting also provides expanded
device management capabilities within the hospital. General
availability is March 2011.

Avaya Patient Follow-up: Avaya is a leader in contact center technologies such as automated outreach and self-service. Avaya Patient Follow-up enables hospitals to use these technologies to call and follow up with patients after their discharge from a hospital. It uses voice automation to ask customized questions based on a patient’s medical records and their reason for hospitalization. Designed to reduce the number of patients re-admitted, this solution also reduces dependency on using staff for repetitive follow-up. It can be tailored to acute conditions, and helps in chronic disease management by ensuring patients follow proper care at home. Available summer 2011.

Other solutions to be demonstrated at HIMSS include Avaya Patient Appointment Reminder, which drives outbound calls to remind and confirm patients for pending appointments using speech automation or prompts, and Avaya Patient Admit Coordinator, which uses multi-modal communications to coordinate hospital admittance for patients recently treated in the emergency room.  Avaya will also spotlight the Avaya Flare™ Experience solution, demonstrating how it simplifies multi-modal collaboration to help clinicians focus on patient care.

Leading Hospitals Use Avaya Solutions to Improve Collaboration

Avaya serves a wide range of healthcare organizations, including Halton Healthcare, a multi-site healthcare organization based in Ontario, Canada, Rochester General Hospital, the flagship care facility for the Rochester General Health System (RGHS) of N.Y., and WellStar Health System, a Marietta, GA-based not-for-profit health system serving 1.3 million area residents.

Halton Healthcare deployed Avaya Mobile Device Checkout to address the communications challenges facing their emergency department. Previously, contacting a physician or nurse could be cumbersome, and in many cases they would need to rely on hospital-wide overhead paging. Avaya’s solutions enable Halton Healthcare’s staff to use their mobile devices to directly and instantly reach a co-worker’s extension. In an environment where seconds save lives, this decreases the time to reach staff, and reduces the excess noise of hospital-wide overhead paging.

“Avaya Mobile Device Checkout is the best solution the department has implemented in 20 years,” said Dr. Richard Casey of Halton Healthcare. “Our professionals are getting connected in real-time, which is a great advancement in our communications, as well as patient flow and safety.”

Rochester General Hospital also uses Avaya Mobile Device Checkout as the backbone of its emergency department communications. The hospital’s employees–including physicians, transporters, radiologists and nurses–no longer have to wait to use wall phones to reach colleagues in emergencies. They now have an assigned mobile device they check out by simply scanning their ID. Approximately 50 mobile devices are in use by employees, each reachable by a role-based extension number.

“We now communicate quickly and on the fly,” said George Glessner, process coordinator, emergency department, Rochester General Hosptial. “Steps are eliminated for most everything, whether obtaining lab results or transporting patients to radiology. With Avaya Mobile Device Checkout, staff is now reachable from anywhere in and just outside the hospital, including the emergency department parking lot and helipad, thus enabling us to easily make arrangements for patients in critical condition as they arrive.”

WellStar Health System turned to Avaya for a communications platform powered by Avaya Aura™ to tap the potential of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP enables WellStar to gain cost savings, and soon implement real-time collaboration for staff using voice, video and data communications. WellStar’s SIP foundation also brings the benefit of increased continuity by supporting three real-time registrations. This enables phone service and operations to continue if one or even two of the registration offices go down.

“From a redundancy standpoint, having continuous communications is significant for us,” said Debra Naderhoff, executive director, telecommunications for WellStar, “because it means that our phone service won’t fail us, and in life and death situations, this is critical. With Avaya, we are well-covered for business continuity.”

(1) Gartner, Market Insight: Healthcare Provider Industry Primer, 2010. Nov. 18, 2010