Health First's Rx for telework

In 2000, Health First suffered from the low-tech blues.

Medical transcriptionists were in high demand, but finding qualified workers was nearly impossible. As a result, rival hospitals began paying transcriptionists top dollar and letting them work from home.

These specialized workers need not only to access the company network to retrieve documents, but they also need home-office phones that mimic the corporate phone system to ensure easy access by doctors and departments that need audio notes transcribed.

Executives at Health First, a three-hospital network in Viera, Fla., knew telework could keep them competitive, but they couldn't launch a significant telework program without an overhaul of the hospitals' communications systems.

"It became important to make similar offers and extend our systems beyond Brevard County," says Steven Shim, director of IT technical services.

Breaking point

While some firms simply send workers home with an Internet connection and a phone line, others opt to replicate the corporate environment in the home. Although the latter is more costly, the benefits abound. Mirroring the office can make training new teleworkers easier, boost productivity of existing employees by giving them the tools to which they're accustomed. For technical workers specifically, replicating the office systems can speed downloads and processes.

As a workflow systems administrator at Health First, Desmond Almarales remembers the long hours he and his team of four database analysts and programmers used to put in installing software and system upgrades - tasks that involved multistep processes that can't be performed reliably over a dial-up connection.

"If they were home and a glitch would arise, they'd have to drive back to the office to solve it," Almarales says.

Moreover, because Health First had grown in recent years through acquisition of hospitals and other medical offices, the company had to deal with a variety of office spaces wired with disparate phone systems. Add to this the shortage of transcriptionists and IT's need to make workers more productive, and late in 2000, Health First executives decided they could wait no longer and gave the green light to the necessary upgrades.

Phones first

Shim and several other executives visited Siemens Enterprise Networks in Boca Raton, Fla., to see the company's new HiPath Communications Platform and its Optipoint desktop telephone, and in 2001 rolled out a small pilot program. The telephone network is an IP convergent system that connects remote workers' Siemens phones with the hospital telephone system via an Internet connection. This also lets transcriptionists who work long-distance from the company communicate without paying long-distance toll charges.

The HiPath phone delivers identical corporate office communications and functionality in the home office. Whether Almarales wants to dial an in-office colleague or a home-based one, he dials the worker's five-digit extension. The system also delivers centralized voice mail, automated attendant and conference calling features to all users across the network.

Shim says he put the transcriptionists on an automatic, call distribution list. When a department or doctor needs transcription service, the system sends the call to an available transcriptionist.

Since the pilot was completed last year, Health First has rolled it out to 50 transcriptionists and workers in finance, patient relations and IT. Next, the company plans to expand the program to include its call centers, the patient billing service, health insurance division and physician practices.

The Siemens software, loaded onto a Pentium II machine with dedicated broadband or dial-up Internet access and a Siemens analog to voice-over-IP gateway, costs about $2,000 per remote worker.

Data decisions

Upgrading the phone system was only half the job. Next, Health First teleworkers needed high-speed connections to access the corporate Novell network.

Health First worked with Time Warner Telecom to establish a DS-3 connection between its data center and Time Warner's Maitland, Fla., facility. This reduced the number of peering points and helped deliver a dedicated 45M bit/sec pipeline for Health First's remote workers.

The hospital chain also selected Novell BorderManager VPN, which delivers the same desktop to the home office that workers view in the corporate office. Its IP Security VPN application helped Health First comply with security requirements of the federal Health Care Financing Administration and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Ensuring remote workers are on the same platform and using the same applications has created consistency between the corporate office and teleworkers' home offices. This has aided productivity and helped the company's IT support staff troubleshoot tech problems, Shim says.

"We needed consistency from the office to the home office: the same applications, login, application delivery, phones," he says. "Usually once you get away from the main facility, you lose all opportunity to do that. Now it's much like they're on the main network, and this is all transparent to all our customers."

For Almarales and his team, telework has been a boon to productivity. During a monthlong upgrade to People Soft 8.0 earlier this year, his team members - who all work from home full time now - performed upgrades and adjustments and relaunched the system from their homes.

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