Hospital Trust accelerates digital journey, enhancing the patient experience

The Challenges: Legacy telephony struggles

The Trust plans to open a state-of-the-art digital hospital on a greenfield site in Harlow in 2025. As a step towards this, hundreds of administration staff were moving to a nearby enterprise zone, Kao Park.

However, the Trust’s legacy telephony infrastructure was failing on a regular basis. “This was impacting patients, staff, and NHS partners,” explains Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT at the Trust.

The switchboard was handling huge loads, as only 900 staff had DDI numbers. Meanwhile, the contact center team dealing primarily with radiology and cardiology appointments was also experiencing outages and its queuing system was restricted to just 20 callers.

The Solution: Unified communications

One of the Trust’s ICT partners, the Fortune 500-ranked Insight Enterprises, introduced 8x8 and its services. The procurement process got underway and 8x8 came out on top.

The Trust chose the 8x8 X Series, which combines voice, video, meetings, collaboration and a contact center in a single platform.

“As a small team, we needed something powerful, yet easy to use and simple to manage ourselves,” says Stuart Hanlon. “What’s more, 8x8’s solution seems designed from the bottom-up for the cloud, which sets it apart. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant also validates 8x8 as a global leader for Unified Communications as a Service.”

The change was felt immediately as admin teams moved to Kao Park. At their new desks, staff use softphones – but they can work from anywhere with their mobile phones, laptops, and the 8x8 app. This also strengthens business continuity if staff are having to self-isolate but are well enough to work.

The 8x8 X Series enabled hot-desking at a ratio of 1:3 for employees, so 325 people could move to Kao Park, up from the 200 first envisaged. In turn, this frees up room at hospitals, where office space is valued at £100m2 but it’s worth £1,000m2 for clinical use.

The Benefits: Better care, greater agility

With 8x8, patients are now getting far better experiences – and no engaged tones at the switchboard. They can use DDIs to reach employees or request call-backs. Meanwhile, managers value being able to see analytics on wallboards in real-time – and can fine tune services to fit needs.

With better communications and insights, the contact center has been able to handle around 200 calls per day, up from 90. They’ve also driven down the number of missed appointments, which can cost £300-800 each in an area such as radiology.

“8x8 gives us versatility,” says Jeffrey Wood. “Every time we think of a new feature we might need, we don’t need to keep looking for new suppliers – because 8x8 come back with the answers."

“The Trust is now among the digital transformation leaders in the NHS. We’re working towards the new hospital in 2025 and have a long-term strategy that involves 8x8 plus Microsoft Teams, AI and leading-edge tech. When the building opens, we can just move our people in – and 8x8 migrates with us instantly. It’s simple.”