VOICE SECURITY – HEALTHCARE
Case Study
Colorado hospital system chooses Voice Traffic Filter to end the damaging, system-wide infiltration of unwanted calls.
Summary
The Client
A publicly-funded, integrated healthcare system in Colorado with 8,000 employees serving approximately 200,000 patients annually.
The Problem
Spam and robocalls were escalating in volume and reach, infiltrating patient rooms, nursing stations, and critical care delivery units. When a sudden surge of spoof calls struck the labor and delivery ward, hospital leadership immediately prioritized the quest for a solution that could effectively end the disruptive and threatening impact of unwanted calls while assuring uninterrupted flow for legitimate callers.
The Impact
- Unwanted calls divert nursing attention from patient care delivery
- Needless distractions increase chance of medical error
- Patient Experience degraded by scam calls to in-room phones
- Manual call blocking drains resources and detracts from higher-value IT activity
- Value-based CMS reimbursement rates negatively impacted
The Solution
Mutare’s multi-layered voice firewall significantly reduces the threat to patient safety, hospital security, and operational efficiency posed by unwanted nuisance and nefarious call activity within the voice channel. Voice Traffic Filter effectively screens out scammers, robocalls, spam storms, and voice phishers while assuring legitimate callers will never be blocked.
Customer Perspective
Director of Telecom, on the value Voice Traffic Filter could deliver to the organization
“This is the first time we’ve had any real data to back that up. This is fantastic.”
Full Story
The Impact
Spam and robocalls were escalating in volume and reach, infiltrating patient rooms, nursing stations, and critical care delivery units. When the main desk in labor and delivery was struck by 60 spoofed calls in a single day, the issue became a central point of discussion at the hospital’s daily safety and security briefing call, alerting leadership of the true extent, and potentially devastating impact, of the problem. Further investigation revealed that these unwanted calls were impacting nurses, emergency room operations, and other critical care delivery activities, including call-based emergency psychiatric response teams. What’s more, patients were being exposed to unneeded disruptions and potential fraud carried through scam calls to their in-room phones. It was clear these needless intrusions had escalated beyond mere nuisance, posing a direct threat to safe and effective care delivery, patient experience, and related value-based Center for Medicare/Medicaid (CMS) reimbursement rates.
Voice Security Made Possible
The organization moved forward with a Mutare Voice Security Assessment to get a better read on the extent of their unwanted call problem. The VSA revealed that a significant percentage of incoming calls were, indeed, unwanted and wasteful spoof calls, voice spam, scams and robocalls, with 20% of those calls identified as direct security threats. The assessment also estimated nearly 1,000 annual hours of lost productivity related to the disruption and waste of unwanted call handling.
As noted by the Director of Telecom when discussing the value Voice Traffic Filter could deliver to the organization, “This is the first time we’ve had any real data to back that up. This is fantastic.”
Armed with actual data to support a business case combined with enthusiastic peer endorsements from several other Mutare Voice Traffic Filter customers, the IT Team secured leadership go-ahead to implement the Mutare Voice Traffic Filter solution.
Applying the Right Voice Security Solution
An additional benefit for this organization is Voice Traffic Filter’s flexible deployment options. While originally planning an on-premise implementation, conversations with other customers with the hosted deployment of Voice Traffic Filter convinced this group to follow the hosted route, simplifying implementation without any loss to function or security. Once implemented, Mutare’s Voice Traffic Filter gave this organization’s administrators full control over configurations and unprecedented visibility into voice network activity through its intuitive graphical user interface and robust reporting.
