Contact Information: Press Contact: Elizabeth Hilton Eastwick Communications Tel: +650-480-4018 ehilton@eastwick.com
ShoreTel Cures Communication Ills for Healthcare Organizations
ShoreTel's Easy-to-Use, Easy-to-Manage UC System Helps Hospital Create Advanced, Reliable Communications Infrastructure While Driving Down Costs
| Source: ShoreTel
SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - February 1, 2010) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ : SHOR ), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with
fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), is increasingly being chosen
by healthcare organizations seeking the right prescription to cure a
variety of communication ills that plague medical staff, administrators and
IT managers.
Despite tight budgets, healthcare organizations are under increasing
pressure to expand and upgrade their communication systems to ensure more
efficient operation, better collaboration among cross-discipline teams, and
faster responses to medical situations. In addition, typical hospital IT
staffs have few expert resources in telephony, despite having to manage the
diverse PBX systems deployed at the many facilities that make up today's
complex healthcare institutions.
Designed and built for the IP age, the ShoreTel system is easy to deploy,
use and administer. It delivers an N+1 distributed architecture that
ensures reliable connectivity across multiple facilities and associated
practices. With support for open standards, ShoreTel makes it easy to
integrate existing PBX systems, the variety of devices typically used in
and around hospitals, and various healthcare applications, including nurse
call systems and electronic medical record systems.
"Healthcare institutions have several competing needs," said Kevin Gavin,
vice president of marketing for ShoreTel. "They must deploy the latest
communications technology in order to improve services, but they often
don't have large budgets or large IT staffs, and most doctors and nurses
don't have the time to learn new and complex systems. ShoreTel's ease of
deployment and use, along with its ability to easily integrate with
existing PBX systems, devices and software solutions, lets organizations
add the capabilities they need without busting their budgets or
overburdening their medical staff."
With ShoreTel, healthcare institutions can leverage their existing IT staff
to create a seamless, centrally managed communications system that
immediately connects the right medical personnel and the right resources at
the right time -- and doesn't force doctors and nurses to learn a new and
complex technology.
Select ShoreTel Healthcare Deployments
Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, Edinburg, Texas
Doctors Hospital at Renaissance remains an unwavering beacon of hope for
the ever-increasing population of Rio Grande Valley in Texas. With a
mission to deliver quality, compassionate, and cost-effective patient care
through its state-of-the-art facilities, Doctors Hospital has grown nearly
ten-fold in the last decade. This growth precipitated a need for a new
IP-based communication system across multiple medical campuses to ensure
quality healthcare services.
Robert Acosta, director of technology services and security, Doctors
Hospital at Renaissance
"With pressure to provide top-notch patient care while controlling costs,
the hospital needed to boost the availability, mobility and capabilities of
its communications infrastructure. We did not want our doctors and staff
to be hindered by technology, especially in light of new facilities opening
to the public. ShoreTel offered us seamless, easy-to-use IP business
communications that give our medical personnel the freedom to focus on
their patients -- and our IT staff can provide improved service quickly and
cost-effectively."
Urban Health Plan, Bronx, New York
With more than 30 years of service and a deeply rooted foundation in the
South Bronx, Urban Health Plan's mission is to continuously improve the
health status of underserved communities by providing affordable,
comprehensive, and high quality primary and specialty medical care and by
assuring the performance and advancement of innovative best practices. To
help reduce phone system management costs and simplify management, Urban
Health Plan chose ShoreTel with its easy-to-use enterprise-wide management
console that works with the organizations variety of switches.
Daniel Figueras, chief technology officer, Urban Health Plan
"Not only has ShoreTel made our communications more efficient by
integrating email, but system management has been greatly simplified.
Adding a new site recently was extremely easy and moves, adds and changes
are now performed by our own IT staff, not telecom specialists. As we plan
to add more sites in 2010 and upgrade to a new video telemedicine system,
ShoreTel gives us a reliable and cost-effective platform for growth."
RehabCare, St. Louis, Missouri
RehabCare is a leading provider of physical rehabilitation program
management services and facilities with 1,200 hospital programs, skilled
nursing facilities and other long-term care facilities throughout the
United States. The company is committed not only to using the latest
treatment technologies, but going above and beyond to deliver personalized,
reassuring care to help their patients regain their lives. The ShoreTel UC
system helps them stay connected with patients, even after they have gone
home, and puts the right data in the right hands at the right time.
Jim O'Brien, director of technical services, RehabCare
"Patients, caregivers and RehabCare associates need the comfort and
reassurance of being able to reach a live person right away. For patient
safety and satisfaction, missed or dropped calls are not an option. Of all
the solutions we looked at, ShoreTel is the most reliable, easy to use and
easy to manage. We have to support analog phones and other medical devices
in our facilities, and ShoreTel was the only company to support analog with
just one piece of equipment and no special gateways. I don't have to add a
server every time I want to add a new capability, and the built-in
redundancy makes five-nines availability simple and cost-effective."
Altru Health System, Grand Forks, North Dakota
Since 1997, Altru Health System has been delivering world-class integrated
health care services across 19 locations in North Dakota and Minnesota. It
provides health education, preventive services, early intervention and
other appropriate care to more than 200,000 residents and maintains a
community of more than 3,000 healthcare professionals and support staff.
When Altru needed a quick and easy to manage implementation strategy for
migrating their legacy Nortel system to an all-IP based solution, it chose
ShoreTel.
Matt Schumacher, IT director, Altru Health System
"ShoreTel's simple design allowed us to deploy the system quickly on our
own without requiring professional services or system integrators. Many of
our employees have found great value in ShoreTel's Professional Call
Manager, which enables new unified communications capabilities resulting in
higher productivity and greater accessibility. With ShoreTel we can more
effectively support the hardware and software ourselves, which gives us
greater confidence in our ability to keep voice communications up and
running at all times in order to provide healthcare services to our over
250,000 residents throughout the region."
For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.
RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION
-- ShoreTel
Customer Success Stories (videos and case studies)
-- ShoreTel
Features
-- ShoreTel blog
-- ShoreTel Twitter
-- ShoreTel awards
About ShoreTel, Inc.
ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ : SHOR ) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified
Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone
system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data,
and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that
helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated
with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest
total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the
industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use.
Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by
replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to
handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in
Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United
Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit
www.shoretel.com.