Nebraska Medicine Creates A More Connected Experience to Elevate Patient Care With Avaya

Raleigh-Durham, NC – May 20, 2021 – Avaya (NYSE: AVYA), a global leader in solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, is working with Nebraska Medicine, using the Avaya OneCloud™ platform,  to effectively manage the enormous shift in patient interactions experienced during the pandemic, and get individuals the care they need, when they need it. The AI-powered experience platform is also enabling this leading U.S. healthcare provider to easily and rapidly adjust their processes and workflows to provide direction on COVID-19 testing and vaccine administration to help the national recovery effort.

Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine is one of the state’s largest healthcare systems, with an extensive network of nearly 40 specialty and primary care health centers. Early in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) turned to Nebraska Medicine as a first-line leader in the fight against COVID-19 and the organization knew it had to prepare for unprecedented increases in call volume from the community. By subscribing to Avaya OneCloud CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service), it was able to quickly deploy a smart, cloud-based conversational solution to help prioritize essential calls and reduce stress on customer service agents and other internal resources while continuing to deliver extraordinary patient care.

“Flexibility was key as COVID-19 has made it difficult to predict what we needed to handle next,” said Frank Plummer, Manager of IT Telecommunications at Nebraska Medicine. “Essential calls in the Northeast U.S. region increased by more than 60 percent over normal volume in one month alone. Avaya’s flexible consumption model enabled us to adapt quickly and scale to handle any number of calls with the benefit of only paying for usage we needed. By having the cloud communications solution manage the first level of triage, agents are freed up to handle more complex or pressing issues and our IT organization can focus on continuing improvement in other key areas. We could only have done this with Avaya. Anything else would have taken an unacceptably long time, carried too much cost, reduced operational capacity at the edge, or compromised the quality metrics our customer needs to deliver.”

Avaya and Nebraska Medicine co-developed a call flow for its network of over 9,000 employees in the event a worker began experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. Leveraging their combined extensive knowledge base and experience, Nebraska Medicine and Avaya helped ensure the hospital could provide employees with a dedicated and easy path to reporting symptoms through the automated system rather than flooding the organization’s call center agents.

“A care team’s ability to communicate with patients along their health journey is vital to the mission of supporting care plans and reducing readmissions,” said Simon Harrison, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Avaya. “Avaya OneCloud helps extend the ability to support every touchpoint, modality, and persona for both patient and employee journeys. By connecting people, resources, data, and solutions, healthcare organizations can optimize operations and reduce risk while increasing operational efficiency. When it comes to the digital transformation of healthcare systems, nothing’s more important than a flexible communications solution.”

Avaya OneCloud™ CPaaS offers businesses an easy-to-use platform with a comprehensive set of communications functions, which can be seamlessly incorporated into any type of application. It is a force-multiplier that enhances the composability of the Avaya OneCloud UCaaS and Avaya OneCloud CCaaS portfolios.  This composability enables businesses to combine cloud-based building blocks to form packaged capabilities that enable applications to support an ‘always-on’ business posture to keep customers connected, orchestrate their journey, align business resources, and leverage interactions and data to better understand and create the right experiences for each customer.

Additional Resources

• Read the full Nebraska Medicine case study.
• Learn what your business can do with Avaya OneCloud CPaaS.
• Request a free Avaya workshop on how to Elevate Inbound and Outbound Interactions with Your Customers.

About Nebraska Medicine

Our mission is to lead the world in transforming lives to create a healthy future for all individuals and communities through premier educational programs, innovative research and extraordinary patient care. Learn more at NebraskaMed.com.