Case Study

NYU Langone Health

Improve Patient Experience and Reduce Operational Costs with Softphone and Automated Provisioning

Goals

As part of NYULH’s efforts to be a leader in designing the modern patient room, the technology team wanted to optimize patient experience by minimizing disruptions, in addition to minimizing the footprint of a physical telephone (by creating a softphone, leveraging the same tablet Epic Bedside is running on). The goal is to ensure that only appropriate calls are routed to the right patient at the right time to avoid unnecessary disturbances.

With patients constantly being admitted and discharged from the hospital, a tool to automatically provision and de-provision the phone profile and follow the patient from room to room would minimize patient disruption and streamline the operational process of moves, adds, and changes.

The Situation

NYULH leverages Cisco’s Unified Communications platform for voice, video, messaging and web collaboration. NYULH also leverages Epic as their electronic medical records platform. Epic is aware of all patient admissions and discharges, along with associated room information. There is an existing Samsung tablet on a retractable arm in each patient room that could be leveraged as the endpoint for a softphone.

The Solution

Fidelus and Akkadian Labs worked closely with the NYULH’s technology team to design an end-to-end solution to meet their goals. We developed a fully automated, follow the patient provisioning via an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system (i.e. Epic) integration with or without a tablet-based softphone, based on patient bed admission and discharge.

By integrating Akkadian Provisioning Manager with Epic via the industry standard HL7 protocol and developing an Android-based softphone that lives in the Samsung tablets, no human intervention is necessary to manage the dynamic provisioning of patient softphone phones. Akkadian Provisioning Manager is constantly looking at Epic and automatically provisions a new phone profile in the appropriate room when a patent is admitted, and then de-provisions the phone profile when a patient is discharged. The solution contained 3 components:

Akkadian Labs Softphone – loaded onto the existing Samsung tablet with an Android operating system. The solution would also work with Cisco hardphones and softphones or on other Android devices.

Akkadian Provisioning Manager – with no manual intervention, our provisioning automation tool configures a custom phone profile for each patient on the tablet in the appropriate hospital room. A unique voicemail could also be provisioned, if required.

Middleware – connects Akkadian Provisioning Manager with Epic (or any other HL7 compliant EMR system) to make sure the phone is provisioned in the correct room.

The Conclusion

Some hospitals never change the phone profiles in patient rooms. Other hospitals spend a lot of time manually changing phone profiles. The NYULH solution improves the patient experience by eliminating unnecessary interruptions due to phone calls meant for other patients. Fidelus and Akkadian Labs used Akkadian Provisioning Manager integrated with Epic to automate the process and reduce operational costs, so the Telecom team can focus on higher level strategic IT initiatives.