Highlights:
- Gaining visibility: By analyzing RingCentral’s reports, Envision was able to direct more inbound calls to a central queue—giving medical staff more time with patients.
- Saving money: By consolidating a decentralized communications environment into one companywide platform, Envision significantly lowered its telephony costs.
- Improving operations: RingCentral helped Envision improve workflows and, by leveraging the SMS API for personalized reminders, elevate the patient experience.
The diagnostic imaging partner for thousands of doctors
Whether their patients need standard radiology scans such as MRIs and X-rays, or more specialized services like nuclear medicine imaging, thousands of physicians choose the experts at Envision Radiology.
A leader in diagnostic imaging for more than 20 years, Envision today serves physicians and their patients across Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—at more than 40 full-service diagnostic facilities.
And while going for a radiological scan can be a scary experience, Envision’s 1,500+ employees have earned a reputation for going out of their way to make patients feel comfortable, relaxed, and welcome. That’s one of the key reasons the company has grown so consistently, and why they’re now a regional leader across the Southern and Midwestern US.
To cite just one example, here’s a quote from a patient at one of Envision’s Texas imaging centers: “Getting a MRI, for me, is a stress due to being claustrophobic. When I explained this, Envision told me of one of their locations that had a larger MRI and also sedation. It was awesome. They put music on, made sure I was doing ok and soon it was done! Exceptional nurse and no more fear for me!”
The company’s growth was taxing its phone system
Aaron Daub, Director of IT Operations for Envision, explains that the company has grown steadily year after year, regularly adding new imaging facilities in new geographical areas. But that level of expansion also put increasing pressure on the company’s phone infrastructure.
“Each of our 40+ locations had its own phone server onsite,” Aaron says. “That was a lot of different call rules, phone menus, and other adjustments to manage, and the system really didn’t allow us to oversee things from one central location.”
As these challenges became more pronounced, Aaron’s team began looking for a cloud phone system that could support Envision’s ever-increasing geographical footprint—and that could also help the company improve its operations and patient experience.
Their search led them straight to RingCentral.
Improving operations with RingCentral
Replacing the company’s decentralized, on-prem phone servers with the cloud-based RingCentral platform enabled several operational improvements, Aaron explains—starting with a level of mobility the company never had before.
“From a mobility standpoint, RingCentral proved to be the ideal solution very quickly—because we rolled it out just a few months before the COVID lockdowns started,” Aaron explains. “We considered ourselves very fortunate to be able to continue sending patients to the places they needed to be, even with a lot of our staff suddenly remote.”
Another workflow improvement, Aaron points out, was the ability to replace the company’s outdated faxing infrastructure with RingCentral’s built-in digital fax service. “We’re now sending faxes through our RingCentral environment, which has allowed us both to get rid of our old fax machines and also to consolidate yet another separate communications vendor into our RingCentral account.”
Uncovering business intelligence that leads to a better patient experience
In addition to migrating Envision’s office staff onto RingCentral’s cloud phone solution—which lets them use their business phone numbers from anywhere, via apps on their computers and mobile phones—Aaron’s team also migrated the company’s call center department onto RingCentral Contact Center.
That implementation, combined with RingCentral’s detailed reporting and analytics, led to a significant improvement in both the call center’s operations and the patient experience.
As Aaron explains: “By analyzing RingCentral’s call traffic reports, we realized we could direct more patients’ calls to our centralized call center team first—rather than having them call their local diagnostic center directly, which is what they had been doing. That one workflow change has given the patient service representatives at our diagnostic centers much more time to focus on their patients—because they’re not being interrupted nearly as often to take a phone call.”
Aaron also notes that the move to RingCentral Contact Center has resulted in a substantial drop in abandoned calls. “Before implementing Contact Center we had roughly a 9% call abandon rate, but now it’s down to about 1.5%,” he says. “That’s about an 83% reduction, and we’re extremely pleased with it.”
Yet another way Envision elevated the patient experience, Aaron adds, was by connecting Ringcentral to the organization’s app for managing patient appointments.
“We integrated RingCentral’s SMS API with our patient scheduling system, and now can use our Envision phone numbers to push out SMS texts to patients for things like appointment reminders. That’s a great solution for helping us provide a service that our patients really appreciate, while also reducing the number of missed appointments, which helps our bottom line.”
Saving money on telecom
Even with all of the additional functionality and flexibility RingCentral delivered, Aaron notes—to his surprise—the companywide migration led to a reduced overall telecom bill.
“What’s amazing is that moving to RingCentral has given us all these advantages we didn’t have with our old phone environment… more features, easier management, improved reliability, unlimited scalability. And at the same time, because RingCentral lets us consolidate so many other services into one, we’re actually paying less, not more.”
Looking forward to scaling with RingCentral
Finally, Aaron points out, Envision is also finding that RingCentral has the feature-set, geographic reach, and flexibility to support the company’s plans to expand into new areas of business.
“We’re growing quickly, adding staff, opening new diagnostic facilities, starting joint ventures with other specialists to offer services in new regions. With RingCentral, we have a telephony partner that can support us no matter where we go, how quickly we expand, or what communication services we need. That’s giving us more confidence to focus on growing our core business as aggressively as we can.”
Originally published Nov 29, 2022, updated Dec 30, 2022