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Avaya Introduces Collaboration Solutions to Help Healthcare Providers Enhance Patient Care

21 Feb 2011
 
HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, Orlando, Fla., – Avaya, Inc., a global leader in business collaboration systems, software and services, today announced new and enhanced communications solutions to help healthcare providers improve workplace collaboration and patient care. The solutions–to be demonstrated at the 2011 Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition–use mobility, automated outreach and other technologies to enhance care coordination, pre-admissions preparedness, and post-discharge care.
 
"Healthcare professionals need to be instantly reachable and quick to respond in order to deliver the most effective care," said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya's Healthcare Solutions group. "Avaya's solutions help speed up hospital clinical processes, and remove the barriers that can frustrate healthcare professionals. The tools we are showcasing today streamline communications in an industry where every second counts."
 
Innovative technologies will continue to play a central role in healthcare in 2011. Gartner estimates that "in 2011 healthcare providers worldwide will spend $87.7 billion on IT, including hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications."(1)
 
Avaya will showcase its solutions in booth #2718 at the 2011 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition. This includes the new offerings:
  • Avaya Mobile Device Checkout 3.0: This frees hospital staff from the nurse's station by enabling communications from anywhere on hospital grounds using a personalized Wireless LAN mobile device. With this solution, a hospital worker registers a shared or personal mobile device at the start of a shift by swiping the barcode on their device and ID badge. This assigns a personal phone number to the device, eliminating complex login procedures or the need for staff to get a new contact number at work. The solution also allows simultaneous log in to applications, such as asset management.
 
     With this solution, Avaya addresses the issues of healthcare 
     staff availability and collaboration. According to a recent
     Spyglass Consulting Group report, 69 percent of hospital-based
     physicians and 87 percent of private practice physicians indicate
     their biggest communications challenge is connecting with
     colleagues in a timely manner.
 
     Today's update builds on a prior release by expanding
     support  beyond hospital WLAN devices to now integrate with other
     smart phones and wireless tablets, including iPhones, Blackberrys
     and iPads. Enhanced reporting also provides expanded
     device management capabilities within the hospital. General
     availability is March 2011.
 
  • Avaya Patient Follow-up: Avaya is a leader in contact center technologies such as automated outreach and self-service. Avaya Patient Follow-up enables hospitals to use these technologies to call and follow up with patients after their discharge from a hospital. It uses voice automation to ask customized questions based on a patient's medical records and their reason for hospitalization. Designed to reduce the number of patients re-admitted, this solution also reduces dependency on using staff for repetitive follow-up. It can be tailored to acute conditions, and helps in chronic disease management by ensuring patients follow proper care at home. Available summer 2011.
 
Other solutions to be demonstrated at HIMSS include Avaya Patient Appointment Reminder, which drives outbound calls to remind and confirm patients for pending appointments using speech automation or prompts, and Avaya Patient Admit Coordinator, which uses multi-modal communications to coordinate hospital admittance for patients recently treated in the emergency room.  Avaya will also spotlight the Avaya Flare™ Experience solution, demonstrating how it simplifies multi-modal collaboration to help clinicians focus on patient care.
 

 
Leading Hospitals Use Avaya Solutions to Improve Collaboration

Avaya serves a wide range of healthcare organizations, including Halton Healthcare, a multi-site healthcare organization based in Ontario, Canada, Rochester General Hospital, the flagship care facility for the Rochester General Health System (RGHS) of N.Y., and WellStar Health System, a Marietta, GA-based not-for-profit health system serving 1.3 million area residents.
 
Halton Healthcare deployed Avaya Mobile Device Checkout to address the communications challenges facing their emergency department. Previously, contacting a physician or nurse could be cumbersome, and in many cases they would need to rely on hospital-wide overhead paging. Avaya's solutions enable Halton Healthcare's staff to use their mobile devices to directly and instantly reach a co-worker's extension. In an environment where seconds save lives, this decreases the time to reach staff, and reduces the excess noise of hospital-wide overhead paging.
 
"Avaya Mobile Device Checkout is the best solution the department has implemented in 20 years," said Dr. Richard Casey of Halton Healthcare. "Our professionals are getting connected in real-time, which is a great advancement in our communications, as well as patient flow and safety."
 
Rochester General Hospital also uses Avaya Mobile Device Checkout as the backbone of its emergency department communications. The hospital's employees–including physicians, transporters, radiologists and nurses–no longer have to wait to use wall phones to reach colleagues in emergencies. They now have an assigned mobile device they check out by simply scanning their ID. Approximately 50 mobile devices are in use by employees, each reachable by a role-based extension number.
 
"We now communicate quickly and on the fly," said George Glessner, process coordinator, emergency department, Rochester General Hosptial. "Steps are eliminated for most everything, whether obtaining lab results or transporting patients to radiology. With Avaya Mobile Device Checkout, staff is now reachable from anywhere in and just outside the hospital, including the emergency department parking lot and helipad, thus enabling us to easily make arrangements for patients in critical condition as they arrive."
 
WellStar Health System turned to Avaya for a communications platform powered by Avaya Aura™ to tap the potential of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP enables WellStar to gain cost savings, and soon implement real-time collaboration for staff using voice, video and data communications. WellStar’s SIP foundation also brings the benefit of increased continuity by supporting three real-time registrations. This enables phone service and operations to continue if one or even two of the registration offices go down.
 
"From a redundancy standpoint, having continuous communications is significant for us," said Debra Naderhoff, executive director, telecommunications for WellStar, "because it means that our phone service won't fail us, and in life and death situations, this is critical. With Avaya, we are well-covered for business continuity."
 

(1) Gartner, Market Insight: Healthcare Provider Industry Primer, 2010. Nov. 18, 2010
 
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About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.
 
Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Some of the key factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations include: our ability to develop and sell advanced communications products and services, including unified communications, contact centers and data solutions; our ability to develop our indirect sales channel; economic conditions and the willingness of enterprises to make capital investments; the market for advanced communications products and services, including unified communications and business collaboration solutions; our ability to remain competitive in the markets we serve; our ability to manage our supply chain and logistics functions; the ability to protect our intellectual property and avoid claims of infringement; our ability to effectively integrate acquired businesses into ours; our ability to maintain adequate security over our information systems and recover critical systems; environmental, health and safety laws, regulations, costs and other liabilities; our ability to mitigate risks associated with climate change; the ability to retain and attract key employees; risks relating to the transaction of business internationally; pension and post-retirement healthcare and life insurance liabilities; and liquidity and our access to capital markets. We caution you that the foregoing list of important factors may not contain all of the material factors that are important to you. For a further list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
 
 

Jonathan Varman, Media Relations

Avaya

(908) 953-6432

jvarman@avaya.com

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