Managing the healthcare VoIP users' experience
Healthcare professionals have experienced big improvements in productivity and efficiency through the adoption of advanced communications services including VoIP and IP video. These capabilities enable call recording, audio annotation to reports, on-hook/off-hook presence indication, persistent instant messaging and travel-less professional training. However, these highly paid professionals are often acutely aware of impediments to their productivity and are generally intolerant of ineffective tradeoffs of cost versus quality, for example.
That's why healthcare IT professionals implementing healthcare VoIP solutions are insistent on mechanisms to assure the highest quality audio experiences for users. It's throughout the entire lifecycle of the healthcare VoIP project that Psytechnics technology has become an integral component, reliably delivering assessment of network readiness, proactive prediction of the user experience and alarm generation whenever the user experience falls out of expectation.
The Psytechnics Experience Manager solution is independent of network ownership in that it can provide a window into the end-to-end service even when the service is delivered in-house, delivered as a service or involves sessions that terminate on other organizations’ or service providers networks. This becomes an important feature of the complex, multi-network environment, which often engages many vendors, many service providers and many users. Having a definitive view into the user experience is a critical credibility management tool.
With the Psytechnics solution monitoring real time communications, managers can be assured that the network infrastructure and all the devices and servers in-between are doing their best to assure quality VoIP and IP video communications, leading to a more satisfied, flexible and stable workforce with more satisfying communications.
Psytechnics monitors real time healthcare VoIP applications
Monitoring the quality of experience is not just about measuring jitter, delay and packet loss in the network. Working with endpoint manufacturers and characterizing the performance of vendor-specific communications applications, Psytechnics is uniquely positioned to enable an extensive, definitive and real time workflow for support engineers so they can confidently point to the cause of service degradation and therefore rapidly remediate service faults.
| • | Continuous service level monitoring and diagnostic services for healthcare VoIP and IP video communications predicts the users' real time experience |
| • | Significantly reduced support costs for real time communications services, since support resources focus on only experience-affecting problems |
| • | Highly accurate problem diagnosis enabling support engineers to make the right decision, first time and fix using the right resource |
| • | Reliably pinpoint the fault, eliminating the problem call ‘bounce-back’ frequently associated with external service providers |
| • | The experience with more than 1 Million business telephony users managed today |
Psytechnics' solutions and experience make a significant difference to operations costs and efficiency
The converged IP network supporting the ever-broader range of healthcare VoIP communications is more flexible and richer in functionality than the classic circuit switched implementations of the past. It is also far more dynamic, more complex and therefore more difficult to predict and control. At the heart of every converged network are distinct layers – physical layer, switching layer, routing layer and application layer. Each of these layers introduces its own operating, addressing, multi-vendor, security and integration challenges. Each of these 'degrees of freedom' raises the impact and risk of mis-configurations, functionality drift and unintended user or application interactions.These issues most often manifest themselves as defects in the quality of real time communications – as jitter, delay and packet loss. But, they are not just limited to the network operation. Endpoints such as IP phones, softphone clients running on laptops, IP video codecs, cameras and telepresence suites and applications servers such as conferencing bridges, directories, messaging and session recording servers each contributes to the potential for problems.
Psytechics brings an end-to-end, all-inclusive perspective to the design of healthcare VoIP service quality. The unique distributed architecture provides support professionals with VoIP and IP video service performance visibility that can be viewed on a per stream-basis, on a per call-basis and in real time. This allows the support professional to maintain user satisfaction proactively, correcting issues before they become service quality affecting.
High quality and high costs don't have to be related. The Psytechnics Experience Manager solution reduces the cost of support, by greatly accelerating troubleshooting cycles and increasing the accuracy of corrective actions. In one of our managed service provider implementations these two benefits were the reason why the cost per incident fell 90%.
Arming the support professional with the information to proactively monitor and respond to experience-affecting problems significantly changes the speed and economics of support.
