Healthcare organisations face unique challenges in managing their UC infrastructure. Compliance, security, data handling, the list goes on.
This is particularly pronounced as the sector undergoes rapid digital transformation, making adherence all the more difficult.
Equally, navigating the complexity of multi-site operations – as many healthcare providers do – or taking on new providers in ongoing merger and acquisition activities and the need for robust security controls have created an environment where streamlined UC management has become crucial for operational efficiency.
“That’s a good spot for us because we bring automation to complex UC environments.”
Marc Haimsohn, Vice President of Sales and GTM, Americas, at Kurmi Software said.
The healthcare sector’s unique characteristics have naturally led to increased demand for specialised UC management solutions, Haimsohn explained.
Complex Challenges in Healthcare UC Management
Healthcare organisations face several distinct challenges in managing their UC infrastructure. One of which is the sheer number of different systems they must consider.
“There’s probably more M&A [merger and acquisition] activity in healthcare than an average enterprise type organisation,” Haimsohn said.
These M&As mean when a healthcare organisation merges or acquires other organisations, they inherit different UC systems and management practices that need to be unified. This presents a huge challenge in terms of ensuring compliance, matching configurations.
Equally, with such acquisitions, or indeed just through expansion, healthcare providers are often faced with the complexity of having to manage multi-site operations with varying management approaches.
This inconsistency is particularly problematic in healthcare because, Haimsohn explained: “With healthcare, oftentimes you’ve got whole different UC teams or different support staff… supporting each different site.”
“You can certainly have it with banks that have different branches, but with healthcare, I think it’s pretty different from most organisations. Usually, it’s more centralised with IT.”
This creates a complex environment where organisations need “a template” of how they’re going to have their UC managed in every different site rather than having an overarching guideline. This level of site-by-site variation is what makes coordination particularly challenging in healthcare compared to other industries where IT management tends to be more centralised.
The goal is to make everything “look roughly the same, which is a huge advantage for them.”
Additionally, healthcare providers often maintain extensive contact centres and experience significant employee turnover, requiring efficient onboarding and offboarding processes.
Such employee turnover combined with extensive contact centre operations means organisations must constantly provision and de-provision UC services – a process that can take up to around 30 minutes per employee without Kurmi, but can be fully automated or reduced to a process that takes less than a minute to complete.
Security concerns have also led many healthcare organisations to maintain on-premises technologies longer than other sectors.
“Many of them are in a hybrid situation where some but not all of their technology is in the cloud,” Haimsohn explained.
This time-intensive process becomes especially problematic when managing multiple sites with different systems and procedures. It forces IT teams to juggle different management interfaces and security protocols across both deployment models while ensuring consistent service delivery.
Streamlining Operations Through Automation
Kurmi was uniquely positioned to understand these challenges healthcare providers were facing.
“We realised when you looked at the customers that were buying our product, and if you look at our pipeline, it’s so disproportionately healthcare that it really stood out for us.”
Therefore, Kurmi, an operations management and migration platform provider, worked on a way to tackle these challenges. As a result, it has emerged as a significant player in addressing these challenges, particularly in the US healthcare market.
Its platform offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options, acknowledging the sector’s varying comfort levels with cloud adoption. “It [cloud adoption] might be 60, 40, 70, 30, but it wouldn’t surprise me if in the next 12 months it actually flips the other way,” Haimsohn observes regarding cloud adoption trends.
Equally, the platform offers a multi-tenant architecture.
“Each one can be treated as its own tenant,” Haimsohn explained. “That means that they can administer their own environment, but they can’t touch anybody else’s, which is really appealing.”
This enables large healthcare organisations to standardise their UC infrastructure while maintaining separate administrative environments for different facilities, giving consistency and operational efficiency but retaining segmentation for potential compliance measures.
This approach, combined with role-based access control, significantly enhances security and reduces administrative overhead.
As Haimsohn notes, “In the absence of Kurmi, everybody gets to do everything, and it’s a security issue.”
Recognising the stumbling block of onboarding and offboarding, the platform also excels in managing shared lines and common area devices.
With its software deployed centrally in an organisation, IT teams can automate setting up a user’s UC suite and rights automatically by setting dates for onboarding or offboarding events, rather than requiring day-by-day manual intervention.
This is equally important for the managing of common area devices too, a factor Haimsohn explained that Kurmi is taking due care in too: “we’re supporting provisioning in the setup of those phones.”
By streamlining these routine but time-consuming tasks, healthcare organisations can redirect valuable IT resources to more strategic initiatives while maintaining consistent security protocols across their entire UC infrastructure.
As healthcare organisations continue to balance security requirements and differing technological capabilities and the need for centralised administration within a segmented system, solutions that can bridge the gap become increasingly valuable.
The transformation of UC management in healthcare represents a significant step forward in operational efficiency, enabling organisations to focus more resources on their primary mission: delivering quality patient care.
To find out more, head to: https://kurmi-software.com/
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