AdvantageCare Physicians – Case Study – Healthcare
How Tellennium helped AdvantageCare Physicians rebuild an enterprise-wide IT system
The Situation
Four large physician groups merged to form AdvantageCare Physicians, one of the largest medical groups in New York City.
Phil Myones, CIO and Steve Xenos, CTO were hired to merge these four disparate organizations into one. They had to take stock of all of the existing operating platforms, phone lines, phone numbers, call centers, email servers, EMR systems, etc. used to run the four separate organizations and determine how to integrate and/or replace them.
The Solution
Myones quickly learned that Tellennium, a telecom expense management and enterprise consulting firm, had already been serving two of the four physician groups so he brought Tellennium on to help with the task at hand. His immediate undertaking included upgrading, consolidating and integrating enterprise- wide phone systems of the four call centers.
Enterprise-wide Communications System
“Early on, we saw the value that Tellennium offered.” said Myones. Tellennium President, Greg McIntyre, and his team stepped in and immediately helped AdvantageCare Physicians prepare an RFP for the new enterprise-wide communications system to support all locations and the new call center operations on one platform. Tellennium helped vet the vendors and build the foundation of what is the system in place today.
“They have made this very complex install go smoothly which adds to our bottom line and to our reputation,” said Myones. “I don’t think we could have accomplished what we did without Tellennium. We always weigh out our decisions with them. I think they know our phone systems better than we do.”
Call Center Consolidation
The first large task was the consolidation of the four call centers
into one. “It was total insanity; every piece, every variable was moving simultaneously;” said Xenos. Two hundred people were moving locations and being trained on a new telephone system that was being installed even as training occurred. Everything from coordinating employee skill sets to routing phone numbers to choosing and installing new SIP technology and state-of-the-art equipment was happening at once.
They have made this very complex install go smoothly which adds to our bottom line and to our reputation.
– Phil Myones, Chief Information Officer, AdvantageCare Physicians
The Project Included:
- Consolidation of the four call centers with more than 200 agents
- Complete rebuild and upgrade of all IT Enterprise-wide systems
- Reduction of all ongoing telecom expenses
- This merger brought together more than 400 primary care and specialist physicians and 2300 staff members in 34 locations
“Tellennium became like an extension of our department. They acted more like an inside employee. They were right by our side advocating for us and providing all the business intelligence we needed to get this done;” said Xenos.
Expense Reduction
Myones was also charged with reducing telecom expenses. Initially, Tellennium identified and eliminated circuits and PRIs that were unnecessary or had never even been used. “Tellennium has saved us millions of dollars in duplicated circuits that would have taken us a long time to get to,” Myones said.
While still consolidating the call center, AdvantageCare moved into using Tellennium’s software management system, MoT® The platform gives real time visibility of circuits inventory and activity across the organization. ACP has access to the MoT® dashboard so they too can see, at any given time, what inventory is in play, what the usage is and what the costs are. “Without that software I think I would still be looking at paper bills and pulling my hair out,” said Xenos.
Tellennium processes all communications-related invoices and provides recommendation to ACP. “They do a lot of legwork to keep things from falling through the cracks. And they give us advice on best practice and steer us down the right path,” Xenos said.
The Results
With Tellennium’s expertise, leadership and support, AdvantageCare Physicians was able to consolidate and completely re-engineer their call centers within just three months. They have built a new platform on which all of their infrastructure will operate and they have saved millions of dollars by eliminating unnecessary telecom expenses and better management of necessary expenses.
“They’ve cut our costs and eliminated circuits that we would never see or get around to cutting. Tellennium has saved us millions of dollars,” said Myones.