Scenario

Sandra is the director of a medical centre which currently has a residency of 6 doctors and an administration team of 4 including Sandra. The medical centre is located in a local shopping complex and caters for general medical consultations for all residents.

The use of telephones is highly important to the business. Administrative staff are required to create and follow up on bookings and appointments, doctors need to speak to the administrative staff when assistance is required, and doctors also may need to initiate direct contact to patients via telephone. To maintain compliance to health information privacy acts, calls involving patient health details must be kept confidential. The centre utilises an ADSL2 Internet connection.

VoIP Opportunity

Given the volume of outgoing calls made by the medical centre and the low number of telephones, Sandra wants to consider replacing the existing telephone system with VoIP. Sandra also realises that maintaining confidentiality and privacy will be required by any VoIP system she chooses.

Solution

Given this scenario, Sandra elected to install a business-grade VoIP telephony deployment[1] for the medical centre for both inbound and outbound calls. The PSTN system is retained alongside the VoIP deployment in emergency areas for backup communication should the VoIP system fail. Sandra was aware that the expertise required to secure the new VoIP deployment was far beyond her skills or those of any of her staff. Sandra was also aware that protecting this system would require secured switches, phone devices and a well configured firewall.

Sandra had the vendors install the VoIP infrastructure (VoIP handsets, VoIP gateway switches, VoIP call manager) into the centre’s existing computer network which incorporates the ADSL2 line for internet connectivity. Sandra hired external security specialists to assess and harden the centre’s computer network. The specialists configured the VoIP switches to encrypt call data from the VoIP networks, to keep data confidential, but minimise any latency introduced. The specialists also configured the centre’s firewalls to allow the encrypted VoIP traffic to traverse the network efficiently, to further reduce latency. The devices were also adjusted to work with the securely configured network.

To maintain the security of the system, the specialists advised Sandra that she should maintain the VoIP infrastructure by installing patches and updates as they are made available.

Despite the initialisation costs, the VoIP system was expected to lower overall call costs to the centre over time, while still maintaining high level of service. Sandra decided that the retained PSTN system would be kept as an emergency backup system for a period of time, or phased out in future as deemed unnecessary.