Melbourne Health

The need for secure collaboration and data centre solutions is imperative. With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe over the last few months, this has never been as important as it is today. Moving from on-premise infrastructure to cloud, as well as improving communications and collaboration solutions to suit a more remote or hybrid workforce is pivotal in today’s digitally-advance world. Failure to do so opens an organisation up to a whole host of problems, from increasing vulnerability to malware and weakened security issues, to having poor collaboration tools and communications, leading to a lacklustre customer experience.

Changing and enhancing the traditional platforms of information and communication technology (ICT), including exploring more advanced collaboration tools, are fundamental to produce infrastructure that improves customer experience, optimises operations, and ramps up business growth.

By leveraging Cisco’s industry-leading range of products, we ensure that customers are provided with customisable solutions to meet their unique requirements, creating a good customer experience, and ensuring business continuity and growth.

Background

Melbourne Health, the second largest public health service in Victoria, serves a population of more than one million in the inner, northern, and western corridors of Melbourne, including rural and regional Victoria and southern New South Wales. Providing healthcare services through a network of hospitals, clinics, and physicians, such as The Royal Melbourne Hospital, North Western Mental Health and the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory, Melbourne Health is deeply focused and committed to improving patient care through translating research outcomes into clinical practice.

To keep business continuity, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic, Melbourne Health realised that they needed to operate from a cloud-based platform, moving away from on-premise infrastructure if they were to operate at an efficient and effective level. Additionally, the public health service provider needed a viable security and collaboration solution that would enable their staff to work more remotely and securely, with little or no disruption to their business while ensuring enhanced protection of their data and information.

Problem

Melbourne Health’s key objectives were to improve the security of electronic communications arising from the remote working of their employees due to COVID-19, as well as to meet the then-newly mandated requirements of the Victorian Government’s Department of Health and Human Services.

The public health service provider required a migration to a cloud-based contact centre platform as their existing on-premise contact centre platforms were limited and unable to meet the requirements needed for home contact centre agents. Melbourne Health needed a simpler way to enable contact centre agents to work from home while ensuring a high security posture for remote access to a secure network environment. Additionally, they required ongoing managed services to ensure a smooth and continued operation of their collaboration environment.

Solution

Melbourne’s Health main priorities focused on simplifying the ongoing management of their contact centre, and the ability to scale as business requirements evolve. To help the health service provider meet their unique requirements, Outcomex assisted in the migration from an existing on-premise Cisco data centre and telephony environment to a cloud-based platform, while also providing ongoing managed services.

As a cloud-based environment, we utilised Cisco Webex Contact Centre to help Melbourne Health alleviating their concerns around data centre footprint and associated costs. We also provided two tiers of Cisco Webex Contact Centre agent licences:

Standard licenses to provide a browser-based agent experience, including voice capabilities, intelligent queuing, CRM connectors, and basic call recording.
Premium licenses to provide additional functionality, such as advanced reporting, email and web chat media, and supervisor capabilities.

Several hybrid services were deployed in the existing data centre to extend and simplify the existing telephony environment and to ensure business continuity. The migration to on-cloud remediated challenges the health services provider had with existing infrastructure, namely unable to meet the needs of a remote workforce which would impact business continuity.

As part of the Cisco Webex Contact Centre cloud deployment, we provide ongoing managed services. In addition to monitoring cloud services, we also providing monitoring of OTT connection to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE).

CUCM is the core of Cisco Collaboration services and is ideal for contact centres as it facilitates session and call control for video, voice, instant messaging, mobility, and presence. It provides reliable, secure, scalable, and manageable call control and session management – ideal for remote working. CUBE ensures secure voice and video connectivity from the enterprise IP network to service provider SIP trunks. Through the utilisation of CUBE, Melbourne Health is able to save on their current network services, along with simplifying network architectures, and positioning their networks for ongoing enhancements in collaboration services. Through daily monitoring, we ensure the smooth operating and running of the OTT connection to both Cisco solutions and to ensure business continuity remains consistent whether working remotely or on site.

Lastly, we offered 24/7 Managed Services to Melbourne Health, which will give them access to unlimited cloud and break/fix support, including complex technical support and troubleshooting advice. Additionally, we provide the health service provide with reporting and incident resolution, as well as managing the day-to-day relationship with Cisco. As a result, Melbourne Health will benefit from a high performing and secure platform that is simple to operate and enables reliable services for contact centre applications.

Conclusion and outcome

Outcomex assisted Melbourne Health with the migration to cloud from on-premise infrastructure, the implementation of state-of-the-art Cisco Webex Contact Centre, and the required licensing needed, including providing ongoing managed services. The cost-effective solution was specifically designed and deployed to support Melbourne Health’s focus of serving clients with voice-only agent services, including premium services offering supervisor and omni-channel experiences.

The health service provider now has a scalable solution, required in response to the COVID-19 crisis and suitable to adapt to the rising need of the hybrid workplace, an improved reporting and proactive alerting feature through our managed services. Additionally, Melbourne Health’s portal access provides visibility over reporting, service desk, network monitoring and equipment, improving their decision-making capabilities to drive contact centre performance, increasing customer experience and business continuity.

As the telephony side of the project is still ongoing, Outcomex plans to migrate telephony services from Siemens, deploy new Cisco Hyperflex and implement upgraded CUCM on the new hardware. Through the deployment of Hyperflex, Melbourne Health will have enhanced operational efficiency, and a faster and more agile IT infrastructure, including increased flexibility and scalability of their healthcare delivery systems that are more secure and able to better protect critical data and business applications. The upgraded CUCM will give them greater control and visibility in the telephony space, improving the performance of their data centre and its capabilities.