U.S. Renal Care
The nationwide dialysis provider uses RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center to create a world-class caller experience at its hundreds of treatment facilities.
400+
locations now centralized and running reliably on a single unified telephony environment
0
challenges connecting care teams to E911 since deploying RingCentral
The benefits we’ve seen from RingCentral span our entire organization — from making it easier than ever to set up telephony when we open a new dialysis clinic, to creating a better phone experience for callers, to adding workflow efficiencies for our employees, to helping our clinical teams deliver the best possible care to patients.
Marcus Burks
Senior Network Director
The third largest dialysis provider in the United States
With the help of modern medicine — and the right medical care team — people living with kidney failure today can maintain a high quality of life and continue to enjoy many of the activities that give their lives the most meaning. And few organizations in the United States help deliver these life-changing healthcare services to more people than U.S. Renal Care.
As one of the country’s leading providers of dialysis treatment, U.S. Renal Care serves more than 26,000 patients every year — offering patients a full range of quality in-center treatments at its 400 clinics nationwide or the option for dialysis in the comfort of their own homes.
U.S. Renal Care also works closely with transplant centers across the country to coordinate kidney transplantation for its patients whenever possible.
INDUSTRY
Hospital and Healthcare
HQ
Stuttgart, Arkansas
YEAR FOUNDED
2000
EMPLOYEES
7,000
A phone environment falling short of its critical mission
Through a combination of organic growth and mergers with existing outpatient dialysis providers, U.S. Renal Care has grown significantly in recent years. Marcus Burks, Senior Network Director, explains that this rapid growth taxed the organization’s phone environment beyond its limits.
“Our clinical centers all had their own phone environments — mostly on-prem PBX systems — and we were adding different systems, vendors, and carriers with each acquisition. It was very difficult to manage from an IT standpoint, and we were often dependent on outside consultants for help with upgrades and adjustments.”
Those challenges escalated to a top priority in 2019, Marcus adds, when the Federal Communications Commission deregulated copper phone lines, allowing carriers to end their support of the traditional analog phone system — and charge as much as they wanted to continue supporting those lines as they phased out the technology altogether.
“With very little warning, we realized that our company’s legacy phone systems all over the country were about to get a lot more expensive and that we’d need to find a newer solution to replace them soon.”
After a thorough research initiative — which included demos of many cloud communication providers and consulting the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS solutions — Marcus’s IT team found RingCentral the clear choice for U.S. Renal Care’s 7,000+ employees.
Everything in our research pointed to RingCentral. The reputation for stability (combined with the fact that some of the other providers’ systems actually crashed during their demos), RingCentral’s ‘Leader’ position on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and the fact that RingCentral was a fully home-built solution where the others had clearly bought and cobbled together different pieces to build their platforms.
Marcus Burks
Senior Network Director
RingCentral adds convenience for patients and staff
One of the most significant benefits of rolling out RingCentral, Marcus explains, has been the speed and ease of adding telephony to new U.S. Renal Care dialysis treatment centers, which the company continues opening at a rapid rate.
“RingCentral allows us to build a cookie-cutter template for our new centers: IVRs, call flows, giving the facility’s employees the softphone and mobile apps. That means those centers are fully up and running from a communications standpoint more quickly, which means we’re able to begin caring for patients in that area sooner.”
One significant new efficiency enabled by RingCentral, says Marcus, is the ability to easily connect patients with nurses for in-home treatments.
“We used to have a single cell phone for on-call nurses covering a given area, and they’d have to physically hand the phone to the next nurse when their shift ended. RingCentral allowed us to make that process seamless, where patients call a central number for in-home help, and it goes to a call queue of on-call nurses — who all have the RingCentral mobile app on their phones.”
RingCentral for Microsoft Teams adds more efficiencies
U.S. Renal Care employees spend much of their workdays collaborating and sharing files in Microsoft Teams. And because Marcus’s IT team deployed the RingCentral embedded dialer for Teams, those employees can now make and receive calls and SMS texts — and even send and receive digital faxes — without ever leaving their Teams environments.
“Being able to call a coworker or review an SMS message from within our Microsoft Teams interface, using the RingCentral widget, makes daily work a lot easier and more convenient for our staff. We also really appreciate that our status is synced in real-time between RingCentral and Microsoft, so if someone is on a RingCentral call, we can see that on their Teams status.”
Being able to call a coworker or review an SMS message from within our Microsoft Teams interface, using the RingCentral widget, makes daily work a lot easier and more convenient for our staff. We also really appreciate that our status is synced in real-time between RingCentral and Microsoft, so if someone is on a RingCentral call, we can see that on their Teams status.
Marcus Burks
Senior Network Director
RingCentral Contact Center improves the patient experience
In addition to the RingEX (Messaging, Video, Phone) solution, U.S. Renal Care has also deployed RingCentral Contact Center for the company’s patient-facing teams (in Admissions, for example) and to power its internal IT Help Desk for employees across the company.
“RingCentral Contact Center has improved so many aspects of our standard workflows. We’re now able to record calls, let our supervisors monitor calls live, which is great for training and onboarding, and we can make the right scripts easily accessible to our agents in real-time. And the admin portal is so user-friendly that now these patient-facing teams’ managers can do things like update their call flows and pull reports without having to wait for IT.”
“Having such a sophisticated and centralized Contact Center solution allows us to provide better service both to our patients, who can now reach the right people for help much more quickly, and to our employees calling in with technical issues.”
A potentially life-saving telephony improvement
From a patient-health perspective, perhaps the most significant benefit of replacing the organization’s legacy phone infrastructure with RingCentral centers on the staff’s ability to reach E911 — the location-based emergency service number for first responders.
Our old provider caused a lot of issues with E911, where our staff would mistakenly get connected to the national emergency system instead of the local 911 they needed. Our patients have life-threatening conditions, and seconds count when they need help. Thankfully, since deploying RingCentral more than four years ago, we’ve had exactly zero issues reaching the right emergency responders immediately.
Marcus Burks
Senior Network Director