Bluewater Health Looks to Improve Call Quality at Hospital

Officials of Bluewater Health say they’ve upgraded the telecommunications systems at an Ontario hospital, Petrolia's Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital of Bluewater Health, in an effort to improve call quality and voice management.

According to company officials, 130 new VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Cisco telephones are being installed and will be operational beginning Dec. 13.

The upgrade means all in-patients will have a private extension instead of the present system where one line rings all bedside phones in a ward, Bluewater Health officials say, adding that patients will have more timely registration as staff will have fewer interruptions due to telephone calls.

The auto-attendant is unchanged

"The auto-attendant is unchanged," they say, explaining that "it allows the caller to dial a known extension directly, or if the extension is unknown, to press 0 for assistance from the switchboard operator who transfers the call to the appropriate department or patient room." Staff can access telephone functions not earlier available, just as an internal telephone directory on each phone.

Bluewater officials noted that additional emergency phones will be installed at nursing stations, the emergency department, laboratory and diagnostic imaging "to provide emergency service around the clock, 365 days a year, in the unusual event of a Cisco telephone system downtime."

One company working to improve call quality, from SIP to VoIP to virtualization, is Tone Software, a software development firm specializing in global business, telecommunications, and IT infrastructure management.

Variety of IT

Tone Software sells a variety of IT and telecommunications management products, including its flagship product line, ReliaTel, which company officials say is capable of managing a company’s entire voice environment across VoIP, PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange), IP Telephony, and IT networks.

"2011 was a progressive year for Tone’s ReliaTel VoIP Quality and Converged Service Level Management," Tracey Whitney, director of marketing for Tone Software, told TMCnet, who added that one of the biggest areas of development for Tone Software was the introduction of its SIP management capabilities that provide end-to-end visibility and control over the quality and performance of SIP-based trunks in converged VoIP environments.

ReliaTel’s SIP management affords significant value in SIP deployments, allowing enterprises to monitor the quality of service of their VoIP call traffic as it enters their corporate WAN/LAN, as then as the physical health and performance of the SIP connected devices and links.