Oak aioffice case study

Call Logging systems for Business - The Oak Call Logging / Management Systems we supply are fully compatible wih the followig systems:  Avaya Telephone Systems, Nortel Telephone Systems, Samsung Telephone Systems and Panasonic Phone Systems.

Product: aioffice Call Management
Client:South Western Ambulance Service Trust
Host Platform: SunGard ICCS
Application: Trust performance against targets and identification of training needs

www.swast.nhs.uk

South Western Ambulance Service NHS Trust (SWAS) provides ambulance and urgent care services for the residents and transient population of Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly. Figures published by the Trust for year ending April 2006 reveal that SWAS received 300,000 accident and emergency and urgent calls during the year and vehicles from 65 ambulance stations travelled 8,547,567 miles in response to those calls. In addition the Trust carried out almost 2000 air ambulance missions.

Service response times are clearly critical – literally a matter of life and death in many cases and the Trust average on scene time is currently published as being 18 minutes 21 seconds.

The start of that process however is taking the initial emergency phone call.

Background:

Jan Parsons, a qualified paramedic, is also a Project Manager in the Trust IT Department.

"I glue together the technological requirements together with the clinical operational requirements – we find solutions and implement them.

The Trust has its headquarters in Exeter and had an ambulance control centre twenty miles away. A decision was made by the Trust to co-locate the two and during 2002 through to a projected 'go live' date in May 2004 we had a project to re-locate the control centre into the headquarters building. As part of that project the Trust invested in the best technology that it could which resulted our purchasing a SunGard DS2000X integrated communications control system (ICCS) which integrates radio and telephony communications within the ambulance control room."

This system is designed to provide reliable voice and data services and help improve ambulance response times as well as help enhance the scope of care delivery by paramedics at incident scenes.

Jan Parsons, "The basis of our performance standard is the speed at which we respond and that translates in to how quickly we get a vehicle to the scene. But on the front end of that process is how quickly we answer the emergency telephone call and thereby how quickly we can get the response under way.

Therefore we have to watch very carefully the performance of our call handlers. We have a performance target of answering 95% all 999 calls within the first 5 seconds but because at the time we had quite a primitive call management system that out put data in an unwieldy format we only had a gut feeling for how we were performing against this target.

As part of the procurement of the SunGard ICCS we had specified that the solution provided had to include a call logging system and specified the elements the logging system needed to cover. SunGard recommended aioffice from Oak; we saw it, liked it and took it."

aioffice was installed in association with the SunGard ICCS so that all 999 and other calls to the ambulance control centre were logged.

All staff positions in the control centre are able to take 999 calls but operationally they split the role between call handlers and dispatchers; if all the call handlers are busy then dispatchers will take calls. The Exeter control centre is equipped with 29 positions capable of taking calls and four of those positions are designated as training positions but can be 'livened up' to handle a major incident. Only on New Year's Eve would they all be fully manned.

aioffice in Action:

The Oak aioffice is capable of logging all outbound calls and producing call cost reports however SWAS focus on the calls received.

Jan Parsons, "The new ambulance control centre opened in May 2004 and what we were particularly interested in is what our call takers do; how many calls they answer, how quickly they handle each of those calls and the length of time it takes them on a call because that essentially is the time it takes the call handler to register an emergency call and therefore affects the time it will take for an ambulance to respond.
The Oak aioffice system provides the Trust with easy to generate reports that measure all these parameters. We did ask Oak to provide some bespoke features for us to automate the collation of specific statistics and were pleased with the way in which they handled those requests and came up with the solutions we wanted. As a result, individually based performance data is now readily available; a process that was taking us a few days every month is now fully automated.

We are able to use the Oak system to not only measure our performance against targets but also to identify call handler training needs. For example, we can see one handler taking 900 calls and another who takes just 500 calls in the same time period and ask the question why that should happen."

Oak also supplied SWAS with an LED wallboard, clearly visible to all the staff, that showed the percentage of calls answered within target for the current day. The wallboard also shows things like current calls waiting.

The call management reports are produced by an independent information analyst within the Control function and these get fed back to the control centre management team who act upon them as necessary.

Benefits:

Jan Parsons, "The Oak aioffice enables the South Western Ambulance Service Trust to accurately measure our activity in terms of telephony. We no longer rely on gut feel for how we are performing against targets and have comprehensive management reports at our fingertips.

An additional benefit is that we are currently undertaking a wholesale rota review using the information that the system provides to show call activity on an hour by hour basis. This is enabling us to work out new employee rotas more accurately."