We want to hear from you! Take the survey.
How do you use It’s Your Yale? How can it be improved? Answer for a chance to win Yale swag.
Yale Medicine clinical phone upgrade completion
March 19, 2020
Migration of Yale Medicine’s and Clinical Departments’ inbound patient phone lines to a brand new on-premises phone system was successfully completed in February 2020. This new phone infrastructure increases phone reliability and call quality.
Yale ITS and vendor teams worked collectively to carry out an aggressive timeline. The IT work that was completed was just one aspect of an ongoing broad stabilization effort to reduce outages affecting patient safety and business operations for Yale Medicine and Clinical Departments.
A team effort
The joint team of about 50 people included individuals from Networking, Telecommunications, Desktop Support, Desktop Engineering, Help Desks from both Yale University (YU) ITS and Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) IT. Given the tight deadlines, the project required true collaboration between the teams. The substantial number of University users who connect to the YNHHS network required the YU and YNHHS IT teams to develop a new method of communication to allow access from the YNHH network.
The coordinated effort involved working with Yale Medicine and YNHHS to identify and isolate 400-500 phone lines advertised to patients for accessing clinical services (i.e., primarily scheduling functions). The undertaking included, in some locations, pulling new phone network cabling to desks. It also required building out a new university-managed telecommunications server infrastructure on campus to support the new phones.
Enhanced technology = better patient experience
The improved technology includes new dedicated voicemail and encrypted call recording applications. The call recording application will also feature a PCI-compliant recording module we will deploy later in 2020.
Migration efforts accommodated the move of 84 agents from 300 George Street and West Campus to 2 Science Park. The move to 2 Science Park established a combined, modern contact center environment. This pristine setting features real-time statistics displayed on wallboards located throughout the call center floor and a dedicated contact center statistical reporting system – enabling self-provisioning and scheduled email distribution options.
Joint IT support a future evolution
The new system is based on the Cisco Call Manager and Packaged Contact Center Services, which is in alignment with the hardware now deployed at the Yale Medicine Care Center.
The commitment included working closely with YNHHS to mirror the phone functionality of the Yale Medicine CARE Center. Departments moving to the CARE Center over the coming years will be able to transfer knowledge of the system directly to the CARE Center configuration.
While initially deployed to meet the needs of the clinical call center user community, the new phone system can accommodate growth for other critical on-premises user communities, including health, life, and safety teams.