UC Building a Business Case For UC In Healthcare

Justifying the value of UC in healthcare

5
Unified Communications

Published: January 25, 2022

Rebekah Carter - Writer

Rebekah Carter

Caring for people is a huge task. While the healthcare environment has always been a fast-paced, chaotic, and demanding space, it’s grown more challenging than ever in recent years. Administrators and team leaders are realising the only way to keep teams empowered, is to enhance their communication tools. Enter unified communications.

Healthcare professionals are now operating in an increasingly mobile environment, rushing between patient rooms, offices, field tasks and more. All the while, they’re connected to an ever-growing number of contacts, from insurance providers, to specialists, and administration teams. Unified Communications is the key to keeping this complex web of moving parts working correctly.

With fast, aligned, and efficient communication tools, teams in healthcare can share information faster, achieve better patient outcomes, and even reduce costs. Still not convinced. Today, we’re going to show you how you can build a business case for UC in healthcare.

  1. Demonstrate the Value of Collaboration

Healthcare teams have always been relatively mobile groups of people. It’s rare for every essential individual in a hospital or care facility to be sitting behind a desk at all times, waiting for a phone to ring or responding to emails. Health professionals are often rushing between rooms to care for patients or working with their teams to keep the facility running smoothly.

With so many people located in different spaces, it’s often challenging to ensure all team members have access to the same essential information. UCaaS ensures paramedics on the field can share data about an incoming patient with the surgeon who’s going to be working on that individual in real-time. 

Teams can call and message co-workers to ask for advice or discuss a problem. Doctors can reach specialists through video conferencing sessions, and brainstorm ideas on how to treat a complicated case. Now the majority of UCaaS solutions also include productivity and collaboration tools, it’s also possible to share files and data securely and speedily within the communication ecosystem. With integrations to electronic healthcare records and other systems, data flows smoothly.

  1. Open the Door for Telehealth

Telehealth emerged as an essential investment for many hospitals and care providers during the pandemic, when patients weren’t able to connect with people in-person. As we head into a new age of patient care, demand for telehealth and remote care solutions will only continue to grow. 

With UCaaS, healthcare organisations have new opportunities to experiment with things like video collaboration and conferencing. Innovators can continue to attract new patients (And funding), by setting up virtual receptionist to ensure patient calls reach the right person at the correct time.

It’s even possible to set up hold music and announcements to inform and entertain patients while they wait. Depending on the flexibility available from your UCaaS solution, you may able be able to build a business case around telehealth with access to APIs which offer excellent functionality. For instance, APIs can automate certain messages for team members, provide self-service solutions for booking appointments, and send patients automatic reminders of an upcoming call. 

  1. Highlight Potential Cost Savings

Perhaps the easiest and most effective way to sell a business case for healthcare UC, is to demonstrate how much your organisation can save by implementing the right technology. While the concept of transitioning to a cloud-based UCaaS environment might have been daunting and expensive a couple of years ago, this is no longer the case. During the last couple of years, most healthcare brands were forced to start transitioning to a UC environment naturally, so finishing the migration will be less of a concern for many business leaders. 

As a number of healthcare companies discovered during the pandemic, switching to a UC system can also help to save professionals a lot of cash on accessing various tools from different providers. With UCaaS, you get all the messaging, video and calling tools you need in one environment, with one easy-to-understand billing cycle.

If you get your UCaaS via the cloud, you can even save money by only purchasing the seats and tools you need when you need them. Cloud solutions can easily scale up and down to suit the changing needs of a healthcare organisation. 

  1. Look at Team Productivity

All professional teams, whether an enterprise group, or a healthcare provider, want to boost productivity among their staff members. Unified Communications solutions are a natural productivity booster because they allow for faster, smoother, more diverse communication between employees wherever they are. This means professionals and specialists can participate in conversations more rapidly and solve patient problems faster. 

Unified Communication tools also offer easy access to knowledge and data in the healthcare environments. Instant access to essential data is crucial in a fast-paced healthcare environment. With UC solutions, companies can integrate their communication hub with their EHR system and other tools, to ensure professionals can find all the details they need to help a patient in one place. 

Real-time data access can be the difference between life and death in medical emergencies when professionals need guidance on the treatment a patient needs instantly. It can also ensure that every member of staff stays as productive as possible because they don’t have to wait for someone to respond to an email, sending them the information they need. 

  1. Prioritise Security and Compliance

Healthcare has emerged as a major environment for security issues over the years. Even during the pandemic, criminals were taking advantage of the healthcare landscape to access valuable personal data. This means medical groups are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their commitment to privacy, security, and compliance. 

With unified communications technology, companies can access the privacy and security standards they need to put patient and regulatory minds at ease. With all communication and data transfer tools in one place, it’s much easier to track the end-to-end flow of data, even when professionals and collaborators are located in destinations all over the world. 

The leading UCaaS solutions on the market today also come with special provisions just for the healthcare sector, like HIPAA compliance and technology for encrypting data at rest or in transit. 

There’s no shortage of ways to build a business case for UC in healthcare today. Whether you focus on the security benefits, the cost savings, or the productivity bonuses, it’s clear that healthcare teams can benefit from unified communications. 

 

 

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