Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust upgrades communications system with Cinos

The Cisco-powered unified communications platform will provide and combine multiple communications channels for the Trust’s 6,500 employees, such as voice, video, personal and team messaging, voicemail, and content sharing.

It will give staff the tools and ability to work more flexibly on site and when working remotely, including extending audio and video calls to Microsoft Teams.

Liam Abbott, Chief Technology Officer at Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The benefits of the new platform will also extend to patients, as a new centrally managed contact centre will make it easier for them to engage with our clinical services. By improving the quality and efficiency of communications, we’re making our services more accessible to those who depend on them.”

The Trust, which provides acute treatment and care for around 500,000 people in Bath and the surrounding areas, required a cloud-based platform – one that allows it quickly to scale up the service as and when needed, is able to support the integration of care services, and to connect the Trust’s with GP surgeries, community hospitals and large-scale Covid-19 vaccination centres.

The relationship between the Trust and Cinos was established in 2016 where the Trust chose Cinos to replace its telephone system. The Cinos Cloud Unified Communication service builds upon this foundation, and will provide the Trust with a robust, easy to use and always available unified communications platform. The Cisco Flex Plan Enterprise Agreement licensing model employed by the service provides all users with access to all collaboration capability, driving standardisation across the entire organisation, while giving clinicians and staff the flexibility required to coordinate health and care services across the local area.

The updates to the telephony system and contact centre will also lay the foundations for any future updates that the Trust requires, enabling it to easily build upon the existing infrastructure.

Liam Abbott said: “It’s more important than ever that we’re able to work in a flexible and efficient way. As such, we needed to work with a partner that had proven experience of acute settings and understood our requirements for resiliency and interoperability – with a clear vision of the roadmap ahead. Cinos is able to offer us the UC platform and support services that will save our clinicians time and, in turn, help us better support our service users.”

Tony King, Director of Healthcare at Cinos explains: “Having a robust and resilient communication infrastructure is important for any organisation, but for an acute Trust it is critical. Our experience and deep understanding of this type of environment enables us to deliver best practice, value and innovation, especially as organisations look to transition to more integrated models of care. We are looking forward to working with Royal United Hospitals Bath as it uses our services to achieve greater efficiencies and service improvements.”