Optimum
How RingCentral Offered Flexibility and Cost Savings to This Rapidly Growing Healthcare Provider
By embracing the benefits of new technology, like RingCentral’s cloud-based business communications, you are empowered to not only achieve your KPIs, but to be the best.
Dean Payne
Founder and Managing Director
A phone system that could enable rapid growth
Optimum Healthcare Solutions Group was founded by Dean Payne, a senior physiotherapist with over 20 years experience. Dean built Optimum Healthcare Solutions from the ground up in 2003 and soon realised that a number of clients were failing to continue with their post treatment exercise. Dean saw a gap in the market for end-to-end treatment and expanded the company to include rehabilitation.
Now Optimum Healthcare is one of the main regional healthcare providers in the UK and incorporates four integrated departments: Optimum Physiotherapy, Optimum Neurotherapy, Optimum Fitness and Optimum Elite Fitness, all of which work together to provide a full assessment, treatment, rehabilitation and performance continuum for all its patients.
“My business has grown rapidly – because of the services we bring under one roof and because of the partnerships we have formed with the larger insurance companies, which now refer their clients onto us as one of their preferred providers. The loyalty we’ve formed with these insurance companies has been built on our ability to provide a complete service that ensures the administration for each case is completed efficiently while providing the best possible care for the client” said Dean.
“As a result, we now operate 24 clinics, which provide specialist care across seven UK counties. As I grew my business, communication with clients, insurance companies and across clinics was absolutely vital. From the outset Optimum Healthcare Solutions required a telephone system that would adapt to the rapid growth of the business, and RingCentral’s cloud-based phone system has enabled us to do that.”
Staff retention is important to me and I’m a huge advocate of cloud technology that enables my staff to lead flexible lives. This means they can work from home, or remotely, when they need to and still be securely connected to the office.
Dean Payne
Founder and Managing Director
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Hertfordshire, UK
YEAR FOUNDED
2003
EMPLOYEES
32
Providing the personal touch cost-effectively
As Optimum Healthcare Solutions is an ISO9001:2008 certified company and one of the largest regional physiotherapy providers in the UK, Dean wanted to ensure that his customers continued to receive the best customer service and personalised treatment possible. But with upwards of 500 inbound and outbound calls a day, the previous telecoms solution – an IPEC 50 phone system, with only four lines – meant customers were kept on hold for much longer than they needed to be.
“As a company that thrives on the best customer service, Optimum Healthcare Solutions is driven by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). But we realised we weren’t achieving these because of the time it was taking to answer customer calls. We considered getting more ISDN lines on our existing IPEC system, but it meant we’d be spending three to four times as much and this just wasn’t financially feasible for us,” said Dean. “That’s when we started investigating possible alternative platforms and decided to implement RingCentral’s cloud-based system initially alongside our IPEC system. Within a week, we let go of our IPEC system completely and now have 32 lines with RingCentral for the price we used to pay for four ISDN lines.
“People tend not to leave messages anymore – they just hang up if they can’t get through to someone quickly and move onto the next healthcare provider. That’s why we have introduced online booking via our website and are also about to launch an Optimum Healthcare Solutions smartphone app – to remove the communication barriers and allow our customers to quickly make an appointment online or by calling in. We aim to ensure interactions with us are as easy as possible for customers.”
Efficient and easy to set up
“Apart from the financial costs of the IPEC system it was also relatively complicated to program, which meant an engineer had to be called out each time we wanted it to be changed. Consequently, we could not react quickly to issues or when we wanted to make changes to the system; like changing call volumes or recording promotions for the client to hear while they were put on hold.”
“Not only is the administration of the RingCentral system very straightforward but the implementation was incredibly easy – all the equipment arrived as promised and we had really helpful tutorials at the start. This means my staff are now in full control of the system and can administrate it and set user preferences without any additional technical support. Compared to our previous system there was no comparison, and this is why within a week, we’d stripped out our old IPEC system. We now have all 10 members of our admin team using the system, and we are now rolling it out for our physicians across all 23 clinics.”
We needed to scale our phone solution but the cost per line was a financial obstacle. With RingCentral, we now have 32 lines for the price of our original four.
Dean Payne
Founder and Managing Director
One dispersed team connected via the cloud
With 32 staff distributed across 24 clinics in seven counties across the UK, Optimum Healthcare Solutions’ workforce is very dispersed, so it’s essential that internal communication is at an all-time high.
“Some of our physicians run an Optimum Healthcare Solutions clinic on their own. But information-sharing across all our clinics is vital especially in our line of work, where communicating a customer’s medical history is necessary if they visit physicians in a number of our clinics. So I think it’s essential all my staff still feel they are a part of a wider team,” said Dean. “We use RingCentral cloud technology to connect all our staff and share information easily. Our phone system means staff can contact colleagues in different locations through an allocated extension number, and we also use a cloud-based clinical system to securely share notes.
“Staff retention is important to me and I’m a huge advocate of cloud technology that enables my staff to lead flexible lives. This means they can work from home, or remotely, when they need to and still be securely connected to the office. In fact, I have an employee that has recently had to relocate to Germany for her husband’s job, but thanks to our cloud-based phone system, clinical system and the cloud desktops we’re about to launch, she can still remain employed by us and work remotely via the cloud. My staff are like part of my family so I like having the flexibility to be able to extend opportunities within the company even when they move away.”
Future growth through innovation
Having fully embraced cloud technology, Optimum Healthcare Solutions plans to continue exploring new technology to gain a competitive edge. The company already has a Physio Advice Line in place, where customers can call in and seek advice from physicians if they can’t make it into their nearest clinic for a face-to-face consultation.
It is also experimenting with video, and allows patients to send in HD videos of strength and conditioning work they are doing at home, or at their local gym, to seek further advice from physicians.