Downtime reaches the exam room
When the connection drops, charts, imaging and e-prescribing stop with it.
A practice is only open when the system is
By the Telecom Agency advisory team
A five-provider clinic moves its records to the cloud. It is a sensible decision, until the morning the connection fails and nobody can see a chart, a schedule or a prescription history. Patients are in the waiting room. The front desk is apologising. Nothing is wrong with the clinic except a cable under a street somewhere.
What a consultant changes
A Telecom Agency advisor would have asked one question before the move: what happens when the internet goes down? The answer is a second connection from a different carrier, switching over on its own, and phones that keep ringing either way. Finding two carriers that truly take separate routes requires seeing every provider's network, which is what a broker does. The advisor also narrows the choice to vendors willing to sign the privacy agreements a practice needs, and returns each year to check the contracts. The clinic pays nothing for that, because the providers do.
How Telecom Agency shops the market for healthcare and clinics
- The advice
- An advisor reviews how each office connects to the records system, then compares carriers for a primary and a backup route, phone systems with queues and reminders, and vendors that will sign a business associate agreement.
- The price
- Every location is put out for quotes together, so carriers price the whole practice. Repair commitments and contract length are negotiated alongside the monthly cost.
- The service
- Failover is tested after installation. The advisor escalates outages, manages number transfers and reviews contracts each year.
- No fee to you: providers pay the advisor
- Every provider compared, none favoured
- One contact for every carrier
- Reviews and support after the install
An illustrative scenario based on situations common among healthcare and clinics. It does not describe a specific client.
