OSU Medical Center Deploys Automated Patient Transportation Call System

The Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC) deployed Cantata Technology's Brooktrout TR1000 for Microsoft Speech Server to automate its call-in patient transportation system.

 "In just one month of going live, we've already seen great improvements in our processes for transporting patients around our five hospitals," said Chad Neal, director of technology engineering and deployment at OSUMC.  "The new call-in system significantly streamlines employee communications for accepting and completing transport requests. We're able to get to patients faster and bring them where they need to be, and significantly reduce the delays employees and patients had been experiencing," Neal added.

OSU Medical's transportation department receives more than 500 requests per day to transfer patients - whether it's to X-Ray, to a different patient room or to be discharged from the hospital. Once a transportation employee is paged, each request requires two calls - one to accept the page and one to confirm the assignment has been completed - resulting in more than 1,000 calls per day that need to be managed and catalogued. 

The automated Microsoft Speech IVR system allows transportation employees to call into a phone application, rather than a dispatcher, and, through text-to-speech technology, have a job assigned. The employee then enters the appropriate digit corresponding with accept, complete or delay.  In addition, when an employee calls in a job completion, a new job can be assigned at the same time, avoiding another page.

"Our biggest bottleneck was managing these calls," added Neal. "It's nearly a call per minute.  What we've seen so far has been promising, and we feel speech applications like this provide a very compelling means to simplify routine processes, and could potentially save us dozens of hours each day on call scheduling. We'll be exploring additional ways to expand Microsoft Speech Server into other areas."

The OSUMC Technology Engineering department built the IVR system with Cantata's T1 version of the Brooktrout TR1000 for Microsoft Speech Server, which provides media processing capabilities. The TR1000 for Microsoft Speech Server provides the telephony interface for the application.

"Because of the design of Microsoft Speech Server and Cantata's easy to use telephony platform, we were able to quickly build and deploy an application that met our specific needs," said Neal.  "We have been very impressed with the accuracy of the communications between our employees and the application."

"As the OSU Medical Center demonstrates, Microsoft Speech Server can make an immediate impact in the enterprise," said Scott Wieder, director of market development at Cantata Technology. "The goal of the TR1000 is to make applications like this one created by OSU Medical Center easy to develop and deploy. We look forward to a continued partnership with the Medical Center as they discover ways in which Speech Server can enhance their business processes."