Zang Cloud Helps Mutare Breathe New Life into Communications in Healthcare Sector

Cutting-edge new healthcare app enables medical professionals to securely reach patients using SMS texting 

Santa Clara, Calif. – March 21, 2017 — Zang, an Avaya Company, today announced that Mutare, an independent software developer and systems integrator with a large healthcare customer base, has integrated the Zang Cloud applications-as-a-service platform into an app that improves processes and HIPAA compliance at major hospitals across the U.S. The app, Vital Link, transforms the hospital waiting room experience, providing better collaboration between caregivers, patients and their families via secure text messages – including appointment reminders, surgery status updates, critical lab notifications and referrals.

Now marketing its solution, Vital Link, to hospitals nationwide, Mutare originally enlisted Zang Cloud to develop an app that would enable medical professionals and others to reach out to patients using SMS texting, which is not secure. The key to Vital Link’s functionality is its ability to pivot from non-secure to secure settings. When protected health information comes up, the medical professional sends a text message with a link, or URL, and an accompanying code. Once the patient enters in the code, the conversation then switches from SMS chat to a secure browser. Vital Link even catches attempts to revert back to SMS, notifying the individual on the other end of the line if the status of the chat changes to the unsecure mode.

“Everything stays secure from end-to-end, and we encrypt everything in motion and at rest,” explains Rich Quattrocchi, Vice President of Business Development, Mutare. “By using text messaging, which Zang Cloud is very good at, we’re able to get phone numbers and implement them into the system very, very quickly and add that to our offering. With Zang Cloud, we’re literally calling an API. It takes our coders a very short period of time to put something together like this.”

Mutare develops a great deal of mass notification software, creating over-the-top applications for HIPAA compliant secure communications, so developers are often tasked with incorporating multiple means of contact, such as voice, text and file sharing. Scaling, building and testing applications in this environment can be complex, and working with large carriers often slows things down while increasing costs. 

However, Quattrocchi credits Zang Cloud with enabling Mutare to overcome barriers created by major carriers and aggregators when developing apps that utilize voice, SMS and interactive voice response (IVR) on a consumption basis. For example, when the company needs to scale an application to deliver tens of thousands of text messages in a short amount of time for emergency notification, Mutare simply adds more Zang phone numbers to its cloud and calls the Zang API. This works to eliminate network engineering and paves the way to scale to millions of calls and messages. 

“When I set up a mass notification system, Zang Cloud will do the text messages and voice calls very quickly and efficiently without any worry about running into busy signals,” says Quattrocchi. “If I tried to do that on my own with a network carrier, the costs for dedicated infrastructure and networking would be too high to be competitive in the market.” 

While Zang Cloud allows Mutare to rapidly and cost-effectively develop applications that add a tremendous amount of value to its end users, perhaps the biggest advantage of using the platform is the bump in agility it gives the company when responding to customer needs. With healthcare customers often requiring an off-the-shelf system to do something it wasn’t necessarily designed to do, Mutare can design around specific workflows, using browser interfaces or phone clients applied to smartphones, as opposed to coming in with a prefabricated solution. 

Zang Cloud provides a robust development platform and APIs that allow businesses to communication-enable any application, workflow or business process . Unlike other solutions today that offer rudimentary APIs that require complex coding skills, Zang Cloud offers developers and non-developers easy to use and sophisticated application development capabilities. 

About Mutare
Mutare creates customized software that makes communication easy, secure and efficient, with solutions for speech to text transcription, smart notification, smart chat, contact centers and more. For more information, visit mutare.com.

About Zang, Inc.
Zang, an Avaya company, provides digitally-native communications solutions for organizations and individuals. Zang solutions are the culmination of decades of communication innovation on a pure cloud platform and include Zang Cloud, a communications development platform and APIs used to embed voice and messaging capabilities into applications, workflow and business processes; Zang Office, a cloud phone system for businesses; and Zang Spaces, a meeting and team collaboration-as-a-service solution. For more information, visit www.zang.io.

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