When Call Failure Isn’t an Option
Ensure inbound calls can get through to your healthcare facility, every time.
Build Resiliency into Your Mission-Critical Voice Applications
As a healthcare organization or hospital, being able to receive incoming calls can be a matter of life and death. Many already have Direct Inward Dialing (DID) to deliver callers directly to a specific phone for faster response times. No voice network is 100% guaranteed to be problem-free, but there are things you can do to mitigate the risk that your mission-critical voice applications fail.
Phone Systems Are Vulnerable
From a carrier network failure to a lack of or poor internet connection for VoIP calls, problems happen where callers can’t get through. Whether your healthcare organization uses VoIP, has a local or toll-free number, depends on faxes, or has providers who use remote call forwarding, you want to be sure DID numbers can connect to your facility and providers.
The ability to withstand unexpected failures or disruptions can mean the difference between ensuring patients and caregivers get the help they need or risking the consequences if they don’t.
Healthcare Providers Are Liable
One research study found that across seven primary care outpatient practices surveyed, there were an average of 21 incoming patient calls per thousand patients daily. Many calls are medication questions or requests, appointment requests, referrals and medical and billing questions.
For hospitals, most calls route through a telephone exchange. A study of one hospital found it received approximately 65,000 calls each month — everything from questions about patient location and event information to medical records and billing.
Only some calls are urgent, but not getting through is frustrating for a patient or caregiver who needs to reach a healthcare facility. It can delay proper care and result in medication mismanagement or missed payments. While the issue may be a lack of staffing to answer all incoming calls, it can also be that the phone lines are down, such as with a carrier outage. The patients often have no idea why their calls aren’t connecting, but when it happens, besides a risk to health outcomes, many go straight to social media or the CEO to voice their complaints.
Now Is the Time to Protect DID Calls
Resiliency can be built into DID calls through redundancy, failover mechanisms, and proactive monitoring. By ensuring that voice applications are resilient, healthcare facilities and providers can minimize downtime and maintain a positive reputation with their patients and communities.
Ultimately, this investment in resiliency can pay dividends in more reliable response times and ensuring patients can get they help they need.
Flowroute HyperNetworkTM: The Only Solution Offering Business Continuity for DID Numbers
Flowroute built its patented HyperNetwork solution as a multicarrier redundancy model for healthcare organizations, hospitals, and other organizations that must receive inbound calls. All other voice providers that say they have failover and redundancy can only offer such services at the local level or for toll-free numbers. While this is important, these solutions do not cover carrier network failures. Flowroute does.
Redundancy
The term “redundancy” is often used in tandem with “failover,” but they are not the same thing. Redundancy is having another system available to take over if the primary system experiences issues. In the case of voice applications, a carrier network can fail; however, most voice providers do not have backup networks. Flowroute HyperNetwork partners with multiple carriers who can offer backup options when needed.
Failover
Failover is the automatic transfer of voice signals from the failed upstream carrier to the operational backup carrier. If a carrier fails, other providers must manually port their numbers to a different carrier, which can take days or weeks.
Our patented HyperNetwork technology rapidly reroutes the call via a different path to a downstream partner carrier. What could take 24 hours or more for some providers to fix takes Flowroute half an hour.
Proactive Monitoring
Flowroute HyperNetwork constantly monitors your network service to detect degradation or failure so it can reroute a DID call in minutes to avoid service interruption. For healthcare organizations and hospitals, knowing your system is reliable and call quality is continually optimized offers peace of mind.
Only Flowroute HyperNetwork will reduce your risk with built-in redundancy, failover, and monitoring.
Get the eBook
Want to learn more about ensuring business continuity for inbound numbers? Download our ebook on DID Redundancy with Flowroute HyperNetwork.
