Benefits of Hosted Telephony for Practices and Federations

Reasons for selecting a hosted solution:

• No upfront equipment purchase costs
• Seamless communications between multiple sites
• Ultimate control of your telephony from Internet enabled devices

Hosted telephony removes the need for costly physical hardware on site and analogue or ISDN telephone lines, instead, a phone system is hosted remotely and connected via the Internet. Essentially, the phone system becomes a piece of software rather than hardware.

The remote location is known as a Hosted PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and can be accessed through any internet connection with dedicated channels to ensure you receive the same quality of voice calls you experience over ISDN Lines.

Quality

It is important that, when choosing a supplier for hosted telephony, they advise correctly about the connection you use. Typically you would need to have 125k upload available on your chosen circuit for each concurrent call. Lower grade and cheaper connections can seriously affect the quality of your calls.

Flexible and Easy to Manage

Hosted telephony provides a flexible, reliable and efficient way to manage your communications. Once it is installed, call routing plans and saved call messages can be easily managed and activated from any internet connection, to cater for the unexpected.

Unlimited calls can be held in a queue with “place in queue” and comfort messages unlike traditional on systems, where the number of calls queued is dependent on the number of lines or ISDN channels you have available. This also prevents lines from being blocked, so you are always able to make outbound calls.

Share Workloads

Multiple sites can easily share calls between them. This means at busy times you may have receptionists across all your group practices taking calls or have calls re-routed from busy practices to quieter ones during the day to cover staff shortages or training.

Reduce Costs

Call costs and line rentals are dramatically reduced with UK local, national and mobile calls being free and the cost of the connection often being less than that of your ISDN line rentals.
With no upfront costs the service is paid for on a monthly licence fee, based on the number of users you have and with Switch Medical, maintenance is included so there is no need to pay for expensive maintenance contracts and worry about what they actually cover.

Security – Failover for unexpected circumstance

Access over the internet and the ability to pre-set failover numbers means you never need to miss a call even when it is not possible to access the surgery in the case of incidents such as fire, flood or a power cut.

Future-Proofing

Hosted telephony or SIP Trunks are the best options to access telephony and will future-proof your communications for three reasons:

1. You can add and remove lines depending on usage and business growth,
2. Updates can be make remotely
3. ISDN lines will be switched off by BT in 2025.

Before this switch-off, it is recommended all businesses update their communications to avoid disruption.

For further information, visit the Switch Medical supplier page or complete the form on that page to request a quote/consultation.