BlackBerry MVS featuring Wi-Fi calling ensures mobile coverage with cost savings in a new flagship hospitalUniversity Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is a leading university teaching hospital in the West Midlands region of the United Kingdom. As one of the largest acute care hospitals in the UK, it treats over seven hundred thousand patients every year. It has one of the largest solid-organ transplantation programmes in Europe, and is it is a national specialist centre for liver, heart and lung transplantation.

Key Benefits

• Makes users more reachable

• Removes problem of patchy cellular coverage

• Extends desk phone features to BlackBerry smartphones

• Unified voicemail

• Cost savings expected over time

The Challenge

In the summer of 2010 UHB was scheduled to open its new £545 million Queen Elizabeth Hospital

Birmingham. This vast complex is one of the largest single-site teaching hospitals in Europe. It has 1,213

beds, 30 theatres and the largest single floor critical care unit in Europe with 111 beds. However, as with

many modern buildings, mobile phone reception is a problem. The steel and glass construction causes

limitations on mobile coverage and adding new cell towers is not an option.

To address this problem, UHB needed to find a way to ensure that managers and clinical staff are

reachable by phone, no matter where they are in the hospital. So it went looking for a way to ensure mobile

coverage within hospital walls. UHB is a strategic user of the BlackBerry® solution and has already issued

BlackBerry® smartphones to the Trust’s managers to provide them with mobile access to email, calendar

and contacts. It has also deployed several BlackBerry applications to senior stakeholders and clinicians.

Because these are the same people that need on-site phone coverage, UHB looked to see if there was

a way to leverage the existing BlackBerry platform to improve mobile coverage.

BlackBerry Customer Success Healthcare – BlackBerry MVS

The Solution

As part of their existing BlackBerry deployment, UHB decided to roll out BlackBerry® Mobile Voice

System (BlackBerry® MVS), which unifies desk phone features with BlackBerry smartphones – and

can extend these services over Wi-Fi networks and mobile carrier networks. This means that calls could

be made on the BlackBerry smartphones via the hospital’s Wi-Fi networks, eliminating the problems

of limited mobile coverage and the costs associated with mobile calls.

BlackBerry MVS now brings unified communications to over 600 UHB employees. When they make

and receive calls from their desk phone or BlackBerry smartphone, the call is identified as originating

from an office desk phone. A single voice-mail box handles both office and mobile calls, unifying messages

to help employees stay organised. BlackBerry MVS also extends PBX features like call transfers and

a central phone directory to the BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry MVS also automatically handles

the seamless handoff between Wi-Fi and wireless networks.

The Benefits

Today, calls are routed by the UHB Cisco Unified Communications Manager PBX to the BlackBerry

smartphones. The automatic handoff between mobile and Wi-Fi solves the problem of limited cellular

network coverage in the new hospital. BlackBerry MVS has made senior stakeholders and clinical

staff very reachable, which is vitally important in a fast paced medical environment. Finally, because

it is integrated directly into the user-friendly interface on the BlackBerry smartphone, benefitting

from the advantages requires no special training or action on the part of users. “Being able to use

the BlackBerry MVS system to route calls through our wireless network and deliver patient care

confidentially and securely has made a very big difference to our efficiency and ability to make

decisions much more quickly,” says Davis Rosser, executive medical director, University Hospitals

Birmingham.

And with the focus that UHB has on improved patient care they selected the added peace of mind

of BlackBerry® Technical Support Services for Enterprise which provides them direct access to

BlackBerry technical experts to help maximize the uptime and performance of their BlackBerry®

Enterprise Solution. They have 24X7 expedited Direct to Level Two

support for technical issues and installation assistance, access

to self-service tools to help troubleshoot and resolve issues and

full version software upgrades. With this in place UHB can focus

on their patients and running their business, while the RIM support

team ensures their mission critical environment is stable.

Industry: Healthcare

Region: UK

Company Size: Large

Solution: BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System

BlackBerry® smartphones

BlackBerry® Enterprise Server

BlackBerry® Technical Support Services

“Using BlackBerry MVS enables us to be more efficient and make decisions more quickly.”Davis Rosser executive medical director University Hospitals Birmingham

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