Industries · Healthcare

Telephony and communications for healthcare

Patients must be able to reach their health centre the same day, alarms must get through, and the PBX must stay up around the clock. We help healthcare providers with telephony, contact centres and redundancy, and with changes that are planned and tested.

A receptionist helping a visitor at the reception desk of a healthcare clinic

Your day-to-day

When the phone is the way into healthcare

For many patients, healthcare starts with a phone call. The Swedish care guarantee (vårdgarantin) gives patients the right to same-day contact with their health centre, which calls for call queues, callback and statistics showing how many people actually get through.

In hospitals, alarms, paging and mobile staff also depend on the telephony, and operations run around the clock. That places demands on redundancy, on how calls and recordings are protected, and on how changes are made in an environment that must never go down.

We have long experience of the larger Mitel PBXs, such as MX-ONE and OpenScape, and of contact centres with call queues and callback. We also deliver alarms and paging with OpenScape Alarm Response, wireless DECT phones from Ascom and Mitel, survivable mode for Teams at branch sites, and call recording.

What matters to you

  • Availability you can measure
  • Callback instead of queueing
  • Redundancy and backup routes around the clock
  • Protection of calls and recordings
  • Alarms and paging to the right person
  • Changes in planned maintenance windows

How we help you

What we can do for you

Contact centre

Call queues, callback and statistics with Mitel CX, so that you can track availability.

Read more about contact centres

PBX and telephony

PBXs with redundancy and local survivability, built for round-the-clock healthcare operations.

Read more about PBX and telephony

Critical communications

Geo-redundancy, backup routes and drills for operations that cannot afford downtime.

Read more about critical communications

Switchboard and attendant console

The switchboard operator sees presence and calendars and puts calls through to the right clinic.

Read more about switchboards and attendant consoles

Teams Phone

Teams for administration and management, with survivable mode when the connection is lost.

Read more about Teams Phone

Third-party PBX maintenance

We take over support for your existing PBX and carry out updates in planned maintenance windows, with testing and a rollback plan.

Read more about third-party PBX maintenance

How we work

From the first conversation to day-to-day operations

01

Discovery

We review how you work today, which systems you have and what you want to achieve.

02

Proposal

You receive a concrete proposal covering technology, timeline and cost, and we explain our choices.

03

Implementation

We install, integrate and test, and we train your users and administrators.

04

Operations and support

After go-live, we stay with you for support, updates and further development.

Common questions

Frequently asked questions about healthcare telephony

Does a callback count as contact on the same day?

It did under the 2019 measurement guidelines from the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR): a call counted as answered if the patient was called back within 24 hours, while calls to a full or closed queue counted as unanswered. Today the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) monitors the share of patients who get contact within one day, so check how your region interprets this.

Are we allowed to record calls?

In Sweden, yes, if you have a legal basis: the national healthcare line 1177, for example, records all calls. You must also inform callers, and protect and back up the recordings. The rules differ between countries, and a recording with information about a patient’s care can count as part of the patient record, so involve your data protection officer early.

How do you update a PBX that must never go down?

With redundancy that makes it possible to update one part at a time, planned maintenance windows, testing afterwards and a rollback plan. Faulty changes are a common cause of outages.

What happens if the internet or the cloud goes down?

It depends on the solution. Many PBXs have local survivability at branch sites. In Teams, an on-site SBC can keep calls to and from the public telephone network running in survivable mode, with limitations. For example, no location information is sent with emergency calls.

Do we need Rakel if the PBX is redundant?

Rakel, the Swedish radio network for emergency and public safety services, and the PBX serve different purposes. The Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO) has found that regions switch to Rakel when telephony and IT are down, so both belong in the emergency preparedness plan. Our part is the telephony, the contact centre and the backup routes.

More on this topic

Further reading

Solution

Critical communications

Resilient telephony, contact centre and alarms, with redundancy and backup routes, for organisations that cannot afford downtime.

Guide

Redundancy and failover for telephony

Dependencies, backup routes and how to test that continuity holds.

Product

Mitel CX

Contact centre for voice and digital channels, with AI, on top of Mitel PBXs such as MX-ONE and OpenScape.

More industries

See also

A hotel room with a phone on the bedside table

Hotels

PBX, room phones and integration with the property management system (PMS), so that check-in, wake-up calls and room status work together.

Read more about hotels

Modern residential buildings on the waterfront in Stockholm

Property companies

Fault reports and enquiries in one place, whether tenants call, chat or write.

Read more about property companies

Colleagues in a meeting in a modern office with glass walls

Enterprises

A better customer experience and more efficient work, with PBX, Teams and contact centre working together.

Read more about enterprises

Aerial view of residential areas, forest and lakes in a Swedish municipality

Municipalities and regions

Reliable communications for services that must always be reachable, with a focus on security, GDPR and clear contracts.

Read more about municipalities and regions

Let’s talk about your communications

Tell us where you stand today with your PBX, Teams or contact centre, and we will come back to you with a proposal. It costs nothing to ask.