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Phonextra Designs IP Telephony Network for
Largest U.S. Nonprofit Home Healthcare Agency
New Network will save Visiting Nurse Service of New
York approximately ,000 annually and improve emergency
response
For release: August 26, 2004 Fairfield, NJ —
Telecommunications system supplier Phonextra, Inc.
announced today that it has designed an IP (Internet Protocol)
telephony network for the Visiting Nurse Service of New
York (VNS-NY), the largest nonprofit home healthcare agency
in the U.S. The new system links nine regional VNS-NY offices,
improves the organization's emergency-response capability
and is saving it an estimated ,000 a year in communication
costs.
The new system was designed using equipment from Avaya, a leading provider of business communications software, systems and services.
Headquartered in Manhattan, VNS-NY employs some 2,900 nurses and rehabilitation therapists, who conduct more than two million medical visits a year across the five boroughs of New York City and Nassau County, Long Island. These same healthcare professionals serve as "first responders" for the region in the event of an emergency, making timely and reliable communications an imperative. VNS-NY also has an administrative staff of approximately 2,500.
"Our previous Centrex system had become costly to operate, and we didn't have the capacity and reliability we needed," said Randy Cleghorne, acting chief technology officer and director of IT planning and management for VNS-NY. "The contact center serving our visiting nurses, physicians and patients had 'maxed out,' and we didn't have five-digit dialing to branch locations."
The new installation links nine of the organization's offices in a single, seamless network. As a result, VNS-NY now has the capacity and reliability to serve patients more efficiently and has eliminated both Centrex and local toll charges, saving an estimated ,000 a year.
An IP telephony network treats all calls – voice, data or video – in the same way, and transmits all traffic over the Internet, as opposed to the traditional telecommunications infrastructure. It offers cost savings by combining voice and data on one network that can be centrally maintained, as opposed to separate voice and data networks, and by eliminating local and long-distance toll charges.
In recognition of VNS-NY's first-responder role and its previous experience with network outages, Phonextra improved the organization's operational-continuity and emergency-response capabilities by including in the new network a duplicate pair of media servers, each one continually mirroring ongoing network activity and receiving critical network data. The two servers give the agency four times the backup capability it had previously. Local survivable processors enable each location to operate independently should the company network be compromised in any way.
To make sure key personnel are accessible during an emergency, the designers included the capability of forwarding calls made to an office number to a cell phone, regardless of which wireless service provider is involved or where the employee is located.
To improve productivity for employees on the go, Phonextra included software that integrates voicemail and e-mail platforms in a single mailbox, enabling e-mail to be read by phone and voice mail messages to be accessed from a PC.
Founded in 1982, Phonextra provides communications systems and network design and implementation services to businesses across the U.S. It is an Avaya Platinum Business Partner. The Platinum certification, the highest Avaya offers, indicates that Phonextra has met the highest standards of technical competency and customer service and support, as measured by an independent survey organization. To learn more about Phonextra, visit its web site at www.phonextra.com.