50%
reduction in telecom costs after implementing RingEX
8 hours
saved onboarding each new agent thanks to RingEX’s intuitive UI
7 days
from contract signature to nationwide RingEX deployment
When a patient calls our offices for care, their stress levels are often already high. We need to know our telephony system is reliable and intuitive to help our staff deliver the best possible experience in a difficult situation. With RingEX powering our telecommunications across the country, I know we’ve solved that problem.
Umar Khan
Director of IT
A multibillion-dollar healthcare provider serving patients across the US
The doctors who founded Carbon Health in 2015 set out to create a different type of medical organization, combining unique digital technologies with a human-centered approach to make world-class healthcare accessible to everyone. Judging by its rapid nationwide growth, the thousands of patients and medical providers who have joined Carbon Health were eager for a better healthcare experience.
Carbon Health has become one of the United States’ leading medical providers, seeing more than 4,000 patients each day at its network of primary-care and urgent-care facilities across the country. The company’s innovative technologies– CarbyOS, their proprietary practice management platform–have helped Carbon Health attract thousands of patients and raise hundreds of millions of dollars in investment capital.
INDUSTRY
Hospitals and healthcare
HQ
Sunnyvale, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
2015
EMPLOYEES
2,200
Telecom dollars they wanted to spend on patient care
Joshua Levine, Carbon Health’s SVP of Infrastructure and Chief Security Officer, explains the company’s original phone system served them well in the early years. But as the company grew to thousands of employees and additional clinics across the country, several telecom challenges sent Joshua’s team searching for a solution more capable of supporting a growing organization.
One common workflow inefficiency, Joshua explains, was the software login required each time an employee wanted to activate a phone in an office or clinic, even a physical phone. “If a clinical staff member spends time with a patient, taking them to an exam room, taking blood pressure, that could be a lot of time that calls go to voicemail because no one manually activated the phone. So that staff member has to review a bunch of messages, and the patients who called in didn’t get the immediate response they hoped for."
As frustrating as the team found these workflows, Joshua notes that the primary catalyst behind Carbon Health’s decision to switch phone systems was to lower costs.
Our mission is to deliver outstanding healthcare to as many patients as possible, and every dollar we don’t have to spend on operating expenses is a dollar we can devote to our patients. Switching to RingEX–which saves us at least 50% on our telecom services–helps us deliver better care to our patients at lower cost.
Joshua Levine
SVP of Infrastructure and CSO
RingEX Okta integration helps optimize workflows
Director of IT, Umar Khan, explains that Carbon Health’s RingEX implementation quickly led to improved workflows across the company–starting with eliminating the required manual logins.
“Because RingEX integrates all of our physical phones and softphone accounts into one central environment, and because we’re using the RingCentral for Okta integration, our clinic staff saves an enormous amount of time by not having to log in and out of every phone every day. That also means more patient calls get answered instead of going to voicemail.”
Umar adds that the company’s patient-support agents and clinical employees have improved their workflows thanks to RingEX’s easy-to-build IVRs, routing instructions, and centralized voicemail inboxes. “The flexibility of RingEX in letting us experiment and customize workflows for each of our teams means our employees can function more efficiently and our patients and partners have better experiences with us.”
In addition to creating efficiencies for the company’s existing staff, Umar points out that the RingEX also speeds and improves the process of onboarding new employees.
Because RingEX makes it so quick and easy to add new users, and because it’s so easy for new employees to learn the system, we’re speeding the typical new-hire onboarding by at least a full workday. Considering how many people we’re hiring, the aggregate gain in productivity here is significant.
Umar Khan
Director of IT
Dedicated support for seamless deployment
What surprised Umar most about rolling out RingEX, he explains, was how little impact the implementation had on the organization. “You expect an IT deployment of this scale to create at least some short-term disruptions,” he says. “Not this one. The RingEX rollout had zero impact on us. The switchover was totally transparent to our entire national staff, and all it took was about an hour’s work per clinic to set up.”
Umar attributes the seamless cutover largely to RingCentral’s support team. “We essentially had our own RingCentral technical engineer dedicated to us the entire time. That team was so responsive and helpful that we never had a question go unanswered or unresolved for long. I think that was a big reason our implementation was so quick and smooth.”
We went from signing the RingCentral agreement, to implementation, to going live with RingEX in all of our clinics across the country in seven days. All without any hiccups.
Umar Khan
Director of IT
Planning RingEX integrations with Teams, RingClone, and the AI RingSense
As Umar points out, Carbon Health has only begun leveraging RingEX’s full capabilities. “We’ve started using the reporting and analytics to help our managers monitor agent performance and to facilitate coaching and training,” he explains. “But we know we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with the RingEX platform.”
One capability Carbon Health plans to roll out soon, explains Umar, is the RingClone for RingCentral integration. “Healthcare compliance rules dictate that we maintain and archive patient data, and this integration will let us efficiently pull RingCentral communications into long-term data storage leveraging our existing AWS infrastructure.”
“We’re also looking at the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams integration,” adds Umar. “While we are not a Microsoft shop, some of our staff utilize Teams, and I can imagine we’ll be able to create a lot of new streamlined workflows by connecting RingCentral into our Teams environment.”
Carbon Health’s patient support department is also looking into RingCentral’s RingCX contact center solution, Umar explains. “We have offshore support teams and other international partners helping with some of our support traffic. I anticipate RingCX will help us create more efficiencies for those third-party teams and enable us to offer an even better patient support experience.”
Finally, Umar explains, his team is researching the artificial-intelligence capabilities of RingCentral’s RingSense for ways of automating some of Carbon Health’s most common patient inquiries.
If we can automate answers or caller routing for some of the typical questions patients call us with, we can both improve the experience for those patients and free up our agents and clinic staff to care for even more patients. That’s how I see Carbon Health leveraging AI in the future.
Umar Khan
Director of IT