Case Study:

MASCO Services

The MASCO Services Inc. (MSI) contact center is the hub for many medical institutions in the greater Boston area. It triages thousands of medically related calls each day for hospitals and physician practices and provides paging and answering services for hundreds of healthcare professionals. MSI is also responsible for the activation, inventory and billing of over 6,000 pagers.

Contact Center Handling Multiple Healthcare Facilities

Overview

MASCO’s contact center handles area wide communications for emergency situations in the Longwood Medical Area (LMA) of Boston. The LMA is home to numerous medical, academic and scientific facilities. The MSI contact center is the focal point of the alert system, linking the LMA medical and academic institutions with the Joint Operations Center (JOC) responders. The JOC emergency command center is manned by teams representing the medical and academic institutions within the LMA. The JOC notifies city and state partners such as the Boston Emergency Management Agency and reports the nature and location of an emergency in the LMA.

The Challenge

MSI reviewed the automatic call distribution (ACD) and operator console/paging gateway systems in place and determined that enhanced functionality would allow them to provide additional services to their customers in a more efficient manner. MSI decided to first upgrade the existing Avaya PBX/ACD system. The focus then shifted to evaluating operator console/paging gateway/telephone answering service integrated systems.

MSI sponsored focus groups comprising of Boston area telecommunication managers whose institutions used various systems. This information was invaluable in drafting a comprehensive RFP. Several excellent vendor proposals were received and reviewed carefully. The decision was made to install Amcom Software’s¹ Windows-based Xtend MediCall^® system to replace the Xtend DOS products that served MASCO Services and its members so well over the previous ten years.

The Solution

In May 2004 the new MediCall system was cut over. The upgrade provided new, efficient and enhanced services for paging, web paging, on-call scheduling, directory and a robust telephone answering service module. Amcom technical experts also played a pivotal role assisting the company in the design of its new Local Area Network (LAN).

Some of the new services included text messaging to wireless devices, web access to create and edit on-call schedules and the ability to send email messages as well as fax messages to customers.

Another key feature of the Amcom system is the enhanced Xtend Page Assure. Xtend Page Assure allows MSI to receive an alert if a paging vendor has an outage or paging delay. MSI is now able to notify that vendor’s customers of problems via the web and provide a recorded announcement about the service impairment to touch-tone paging end-users.

According to Gary DuPont, director of information systems for MSI, "Although transparent, as it should be to end-users such as physicians, nurses and administrators, the new system has already had a significant positive impact at the institutional level. One gain we see is the ability to isolate various paging vendors when one is experiencing a service problem."

For back up and redundancy purposes, MSI purchased pagers from multiple vendors. In the past, when one vendor’s services were malfunctioning, all end-users were affected and re-routed to the page operator. "With the new system this will not happen. MSI will be able to segregate the paging vendor having the problem and alert specific end-users of that problem." The potential also exists, in the near future, for integrating the MSI web paging system with other Boston hospitals that work closely with MSI customers.

The Result

The successful outcome of this project is a testament to the hard work of the project teams and to the extraordinary and laudable performances of the MSI customer care representatives whose enthusiasm and contributions were invaluable. As a result to this project, MSI ended its fiscal year with a service level of 91-percent. This exceeded the service objective of having 90-percent of calls answered within that timeframe.