The traditional telephone is essential and important for healthcare. But it also has its drawbacks. To keep providing quality care in the future, stay a desirable employer and manage costs effectively, you need innovative telephony that works with a modern, digital workplace on mobile and PC.

We also asked Jurrit Wilhelmus, productivity expert at Microsoft, for his view on the role and implementation of Teams Calling, the Microsoft cloud solution for telephony. We also asked Arno Zwegers, specialist in the digital workplace at Rapid Circle, and Sam Gregory, technical consultant, for input.

Let’s start at the beginning…

What is Teams Calling?

Teams Calling is a modern, integrated phone system that works smoothly with the digital workplace in the Microsoft cloud. Teams Calling is part of Microsoft’s ‘Unified Communications’ vision and combines chatting, meetings, making and getting calls in one app. This has big benefits for the costs. The number of workplaces and fixed phones can be cut down, an employee only needs one device and the costs and risks of IT management are smaller. You can use Teams Calling to automate call transfers. This way, you make sure that colleagues, clients and their families get the right person on the phone quickly and automatically.

If you look one step further than just calling, you also see that bringing together all forms of communication such as video

and chat makes smart integrations possible. These process adjustments make your organisation more productive and drastically improve the employee experience.

Advantages and disadvantages of calling

You want to improve your productivity and effectiveness, use data more creatively and provide your staff with systems and devices that truly help them. These are the objectives that drive your innovation as a healthcare institution. The cloud is a key factor in this. And along with the cloud, tablets and smartphones are also emerging.

Jurrit Wilhelmus: “The telephone is a reliable technology, but a call always has its limitations. You cannot include images or other data in it, because there is no more possibility for improvement. In a digital workplace you can add more context to a call. For example, attach a photo.”

Sooner or later you will have to replace your current telephony in order to continue to provide good care. In our view, it makes sense to combine this with a new digital workplace and Teams telephony.

Arno Zwegers: “Voice communication is convenient and familiar and it has the ‘now’ aspect. We don’t want to get rid of that. But by integrating it with Teams you add video, and also different ways to share information with each other. And then there are things that can be done ‘later’. So you can communicate asynchronously more often and prioritise calls, signals and information. Based on this you then decide which form of communication is suitable. We’re going to talk about communicating, not about calling anymore. In a modern workplace you can easily switch from voice to text to image and you can communicate data very efficiently by connecting systems such as the ECD, your access gates, and location. Often you don’t have to call anymore.”

Sam sees practical advantages too: “Availability is always a challenge. Older PBX systems often malfunction and are usually not supervised or maintained by your own IT team. Teams has active status tracking and updates for devices are simple. With Teams you also lower your costs on your employees’ mobile plans.”

The importance of employee experience

A major challenge that healthcare faces right now is: ‘How do I keep being a desirable employer in a time of work stress and staff shortages?’ And that is a key reason to update your telephony. Because to keep being a desirable employer, you want to eliminate unnecessary, repetitive work for healthcare providers. Innovation therefore always prioritises the employee experience first. We always design the data centre, workplace, data platform and communication in a way that makes people happy. Because cloud technology has big efficiency and cost benefits, but it is much more important that healthcare providers and patients can communicate easily and smoothly and always have access to the information that is relevant to them at that moment.

Employee experience is also a factor for retention in IT teams. Working with telephone exchanges does not help with this, because these are often hard to manage systems that need a lot of manual work to stay up to date.

Teams telephony for faster, better care

You face a tough situation every day as a healthcare provider: how to communicate with colleagues when you are working with a client. A regular phone only lets you either explain the situation verbally or request someone to join you. There is no other option. Meanwhile, you are in a hurry and have to make decisions. The staff levels are low and it may take a while for a colleague to get to you. And that’s if you know who to call, since you first need to figure out who is on duty and available.

With Teams, you can set up ‘crowdsourcing’ easily: the system itself finds who is available and matches them based on the needed expertise. The conversation itself also has more options. For example, the person who is called will see the relevant data from the client file right away and you can send a photo, such as a wound for a doctor to examine. You can ‘teleport’ colleagues and experts to where they are needed. This reduces the work and time that are now wasted on transferring, calling around, searching and moving. This saves everyone a lot of time and therefore leads to better and more efficient care. If your employees wear earphones or headsets, they have their hands free for their work.

Better conversations, more contact

The principle of crowdsourcing also works for an incoming call. This is automatically forwarded to someone who can actually handle it, without waiting times and transfer steps. Sentiment analysis of the conversation tells you if people are stressed or dissatisfied and you can monitor the quality of conversations to improve patient experience. Transferring and waiting are sometimes daily frustrations for clients and their families.

But why stop at improving current contact? With better digital tools you can move forward and do beautiful things that were not possible before.

Arno has a vision for this: “Think about elderly people, for instance: they often stay at home longer and are isolated. Loneliness is then a major issue. Then don’t just look at the care delivery, but more widely: how can we use technology to enhance well-being? Can we use cloud telephony to connect them easily? Calling is a way of communication that people are used to, so we can use it to create very easy contact between clients. Talk to them, play a game on the tablet. If you have more social contact, you also have better physical health. And it makes prevention easier, because there are more signal moments. This aligns with the shift from reactive to proactive care.”

More context on calls

An alarm button allows the client, as well as family and care staff, to get attention, even when other ways of communication are not feasible. But these calls often miss context. By connecting the alarm system to your digital workplace via Teams telephony, you can include data so that employees who answer right away have a better understanding of the situation. Call data is then automatically recorded in the ECD, so that there is less stress on the handover and the care provider’s memory. But innovations can also go beyond that.

“As a healthcare institution you have data from entrance gates, cameras, motion sensors, tablets and telephones of employees… If you link all that, you have so much data that you may no longer have to wait for an alarm notification at all. The system can then automatically report a dangerous situation. For example, consider a client at risk of self-harm: you monitor him with a camera. But you cannot, may not and do not want to make those images widely available, so you train an AI to analyse them. You can share the signals that come from this widely. This way, the right colleagues can intervene at the right time.”

Another way to make the alarm button more accessible and less stressful for clients and employees is to have it in an app, for example with voice recognition. There will also be a possibility to have other buttons with a lower priority. All requests are automatically directed to the appropriate person or department, with the relevant context.

If you collect enough data, you can then analyse it and use the results to support decisions. Who pushes the buttons? Why? How often? Can we link these files for more insight? For example, there may be correlations between alarms and changes in circumstances or medication. You can use this to predict and automatically indicate priorities. This way you work towards saving time, fewer errors, higher quality, lower workload and better client safety.

Impact on infrastructure and organisation

To adopt modern telephony in healthcare, you need to complete some technical and organisational steps. On a technical level, it is wise not to discard the old telephone switches and mobile connections until the new way of working is at least as dependable. By opting for a hybrid solution, and thus keeping the old landline numbers and infrastructure accessible, you can create a situation that combines the best of both worlds. But in many cases you also need a new telephone switch that integrates better with your cloud solution and that supports modern features such as forwarding to mobile phones, group calls and rotating calls.

Your internet connection is more dependable as the WiFi quality improves, so you don’t need your phone exchange as much as before. However, many healthcare institutions still keep it as a backup option and don’t get rid of it yet.

To use Teams telephony, you also need a digital workspace that is based on Microsoft technology, such as Rapid Circle’s Cloud Workplace. This can be a complicated project to implement, however the complexity depends on your ECD implementation, your current infrastructure and your applications. But it also depends on your organisation. Teams telephony and digital workplace are the foundations for further innovation in collaboration, remote care, data use and preventive care. You need to involve IT, management and healthcare workers in these important steps towards the future of healthcare. But remember: even though there might be some initial resistance, a solution that makes work and life easier for your employees will have a lot of support. As long as you support and guide people well.

Business case: how Teams telephony pays for itself

Teams telephony has a cost. But you will soon see the first advantages, because you can mostly automate redirection. So the people who are doing this now can concentrate on something else. Also, you save time and reduce mistakes for healthcare and support staff. This means you spend less time on repairing and unnecessary walking or being on hold. IT manual work is also decreased. One of our customers calculated the possible cost benefits at ‘potentially 80%, but at least half’. We don’t verify that calculation: we see benefits of 30-40% ourselves.

However, the main benefit of investing in Teams Calling is not monetary. This is about improving the quality of care, the safety of clients and the well-being of your employees, as well as a better experience for IT professionals and facility employees.

In addition to this series of articles, we are organizing, together with Microsoft, the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare.”

Experts and experienced experts will tell you during this event:

• How to take the first step towards a cloud platform as a basis for healthcare innovation and regional cooperation
• How cloud technology and data will shape the future of healthcare, for example by facilitating the move from curative to preventive
• How data exchange radically improves chain care
• How a digital workplace frees healthcare providers from time-consuming manual work and makes their work more pleasant and efficient
• How a modern workplace contributes to retaining and attracting healthcare professionals
• How to break free from the limitations of your EPD and organize your care process the way it works for you
• The vision of other healthcare organizations on the future of healthcare

Register now and don’t miss it

Complete the form below and you will attend the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare” on April 18.

Other articles in this series: 

Prepare your healthcare institution for the future, even if you don’t know exactly what it will look like

You are a healthcare institution, and your goal is to help your clients live long and well. To accomplish this, you face some serious challenges, both now and later. You have a shortage of staff, and fewer people want to work in healthcare. Clients also require more care, live longer, and stay at home more often and for more time. But you already know this. The question is: how will we solve it?

Better chain care in the cloud

More and more, people want to collaborate better with their chain partners. And collaboration is more than ‘knowing each other’s contact details and calling when there is a crisis’. Most healthcare institutions and regions know this well. And all over the Netherlands, healthcare professionals, managers and IT experts are looking for ways to improve things. Many healthcare institutions are finding out that they cannot do this by themselves and they need to share data with their chain partners. Because your healthcare institution is often just one link in the chain. On a platform of freed data you can create care that is less work, but more effective.

Automate and support processes, also outside the ECD

It is not feasible to digitise every care process in your ECD. Healthcare institutions that have attempted this for years now have a system that is hard to maintain and that does not work well with other systems and chain partners. Low code solutions like Microsoft Power Platform may help. There are also many processes in healthcare that are still done manually, such as preventive monitoring of clients or asking for help from a colleague. There is a lot of potential for smart automation in these ‘unstructured processes’.

How to be an appealing employer for home care workers in 2024

Being a healthcare institution, you want to manage your work well and be a desirable employer. A modern digital workplace saves your people from a lot of frustration and needless manual work. It is also a crucial element in all digital workflows and in enabling data access.

Data as a driving force for healthcare innovation: ZorgSaam is building a platform for the future

What are the benefits of a data platform for better care, enhanced patient experiences and more efficient healthcare work? And how can a data platform prepare you, as a healthcare institution, for the future, even if you don’t know exactly what it will entail? ZorgSaam has the answer, because they created a robust data platform that supports cutting-edge healthcare innovations. With a data platform on Microsoft Azure, ZorgSaam can focus on data-driven decision-making, user-friendly access to information and other data applications for future-proof care, without technical obstacles.