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David Condra (right) accepting the Innovator of the Year award in San Jose from VON Magazine for the DCM (Dalcon Communications Manager) product.

At the end of this month, Dalcon Communication Systems, Inc., will formally roll out a healthcare communications package designed to meet the needs of the industry to manage large call volumes in an efficient and affordable manner.

David Condra, chairman and CEO of Nashville-based Dalcon, noted the underlying technology of the new product has been used for several years but was cost prohibitive for most small businesses. Additionally, “Dalcon Communications Manager –– The Healthcare Edition” has been tweaked to meet the very specific needs of clinical entities.

“A lot of what we’re talking about has been available to very large companies for a number of years, but it was way too expensive to bring down to a clinic or small hospital level. This new world of software is more affordable and more available,” he said.

Condra said a differentiating factor of this phone system is that it recognizes the specific challenges inherent in the healthcare industry.

“We’ve enabled the application of computer systems and software to deal with the real world challenges of healthcare, which is that a very high volume of their workload is still coming at them in the form of phone and fax,” he pointed out. Condra added these two particular modes of information sharing also happen to be the most difficult to manage efficiently.

Instead of rolling through scores of voice mails or searching for a message scribbled on a sticky note, Dalcon’s new healthcare product integrates phone messages and faxes into the e-mail system. The information is saved to the computer with a subject line that includes the caller’s name and time the message was left. The voice mail is attached as a sound file, or it can actually be converted to text so the recipient literally reads the message as an e-mail. In the second case, the sound file is still available for verification.

Similarly, the system eliminates the reams of paper used for faxes and converts the information into a PDF format that can be more easily managed and used to populate electronic medical records. Condra noted “full blown” electronic health record systems already exist with this capability, but he said that many practices and small hospitals haven’t had the resources to implement the technology.

Other features of the system include a number of management functions such as automated appointment reminders. The software also captures call patterns, which enables a facility to more accurately match staffing to volume. Similarly, the system alerts an administrator if too many patients are waiting for scheduling or triage so that an appropriate staff member or clinician can be added to the queue. Call parking is another popular element that allows an incoming call to be “parked” on a specific extension and retrieved from any phone in the system. The “Follow Me” feature integrates landlines and cell phones so a call to the office extension is automatically forwarded to a mobile number with full caller identification.

The dial-in conference bridge, which is a standard inclusion for the healthcare edition, allows for virtual meetings without the high price tag that has typically been associated with “pay-by-the-minute” options currently being used.

“Those are all relatively powerful capabilities that have been historically unavailable in a small clinic or hospital phone system,” Condra said.

He added, the “significant cost savings” in terms of staff hours, supply costs, infrastructure and system management make the technology particularly attractive to smaller healthcare facilities.

“We have the technology … it’s accessible, available and affordable,” he concluded.



July 2008

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