VoIP platform to deliver savings and efficiencies at NHS trust

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health trust to benefit from Siemens Enterprise Communications technology

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) is set to save £225,000 by implementing a Siemens Enterprise Communications VoIP (voice over IP) platform, according to a report by Forrester.

The trust will save money by decommissioning 2,500 leased Centrex telephone lines and by reducing business travel thanks to the system's audio conferencing capabilities. The trust expects to save a total of £1.65m over seven years.

However, over the same time period the company expects to incur incremental costs, largely through new investments in hardware, software and internal labour, of about £1.4m. This leaves the total savings at £225,000 for the seven year period.

Although the financial savings drove the business case for the trust, it expects to gain additional value through operational efficiencies that will be made possible by the communications platform.

For example, the trust aims to better support remote workers by integrating business telephone features with employee smartphones. It also intends to install a system that will allow hospitals to broadcast emergency calls to target populations, which will effectively eliminate the problem of finding available members of staff in time-critical situations.

"Cost is an important driver for the trust, but the long-term vision focuses on ensuring that the trust benefits from improvements to our quality of service, team efficiency and the mobility of our workforce in a cost-efficient manner - in particular to support more joined-up team collaboration, both for mobile staff and across multiple sites.

"Also, making teams more efficient; pushing information to teams as they see service users," said James Longmore, director of ICT, estates and facilities at BSMHFT.

Plans to improve its call centre with better queue handling and reporting capabilities are also being considered.

The trust serves a population of more than a million people, operates from more than 140 sites and has about 4,000 employees.