Nearly every industry has turned to cloud-based technologies over the last year and a half to evolve in the face of changing workforce and customer expectations, but healthcare has lagged. Despite facing unique challenges – from the demand for telemedicine to patient communication preferences – healthcare has been cautious when embracing the cloud. Soon, though, healthcare organizations will have to come to terms with their hesitancy because modern cloud solutions – cloud communications in particular – will be the best way forward.

Legacy communications infrastructure will eventually no longer support the applications and services healthcare organizations need to offer, posing short- and long-term risks. Avaya sees and understands the industry’s reluctance to move cloud-ward, and we’ve been able to help many healthcare customers across the world overcome this hurdle.

Canadian healthcare organizations can embrace tools and technologies such as cloud-native app development, data integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to digitally transform – in a way that meets their budget and desired pace. Here are two Canadian healthcare customers who Avaya is helping create experiences that matter:

Consolidating Contact Center Services to Provide Better Care

One Canadian healthcare organization – created in 2015 as the result of a merger of nine public health and social services establishments – had been working for decades with obsolete PBXs. The organization supports more than 10,500 employees across 62 facilities and was severely limited by its legacy phone hardware. Without a central contact center, each location worked independently of one another. This created an abrasive patient experience across the company, affecting satisfaction, retention, and the organization’s reputation as a trusted healthcare provider. 

This customer needed to fix:

• Deficiencies in every aspect of communication, from access to care services to patient follow-ups to patient confirmation
• A lack of visibility into “no shows” 
• A lack of data on patient and care team communications
• Frequent downtime with high mean time to recover (MTTR)
• A lack of redundancy

These problems not only resulted in poor patient experiences but put patients at risk in some instances. Using Avaya OneCloud, the organization was able to consolidate all communications and contact center services for its entire 62 establishments. Our AI-powered platform enabled them to create a consistent approach to patient communication across all services, while opening the door to applications that create exciting new customer value. With better visibility into patient and care team communications, the organization can make smarter decisions about growth, and high redundancy prevents damaging downtime.

Elevating the Patient Experience Through Automation

This customer – a Quebec-based super hospital with six major centers – functions as one of the world’s foremost academic health centers and shapes the course of adult and pediatric medicine. Its legacy contact center platform could not support its communications requirements or the performance of its approximately 100 agents. 

Avaya replaced the health center’s outdated contact center platform with Avaya OneCloud CCaaS, equipping them with a plethora of robust, customer-focused features such as  intelligent call routing, multiexperience (with support for a wide range of digital and physical channels), and contact routing via email, chat, and text message. Avaya OneCloud provides automated voice response, interactive voice response (IVR), voice recognition, voice recording, and proactive appointment reminders by phone, email, and text so the health center can more effectively reach patients across all channels and communication methods. 

These new capabilities enable the health center to better deliver on its mission to provide exceptional, multidisciplinary, patient-centric care. The organization also invested in Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, our cloud-based meetings and team collaboration application, to quickly create a COVID-19 hotline. A suite of integrated communication features empowers agents to seamlessly call, chat, meet, message, and video conference from anywhere, enabling the organization to flexibly adapt and respond to meet the needs of its community during the pandemic.

Healthcare has long been on the precipice of cloud-enabled digital transformation. Now, there’s no choice but to take that next step forward. Providers across the healthcare ecosystem have an incredible opportunity to be on the cutting edge of care – creating invaluable new patient, and employee opportunities. Learn more how about Avaya is helping Canadian healthcare organizations create their perfect cloud migration.