Q1 Medical

RingCentral’s integrated cloud-based platform has ‘healed’ telephony at Q1 Medical’s network of suburban clinics, giving administrators full visibility of calls, and delivering a reliable and stable service with future potential to grow with the business. Integration with its AutoMed Systems patient management platform is delivering operational efficiencies and an enhanced experience for Q1 Medical employees and patients.

q1medical.com

I know that I have the whole RingCentral team behind me if I can't fix something. The saga we had with our phones is finally over; now we can pay full attention to our own organisation internally to improve our services to our staff, patients and doctors.

Adnan Hafeez

Operations Manager Q1 Medica

KEY STATS

Managing up to 1200 inbound calls per week, across five medical centres

Handling complex call flows integrated with AutoMed Systems patient engagement solution

Reliable and stable UCaaS platform with capacity to scale with expected business growth

Q1 Medical currently operates five medical centres in the western suburbs of Melbourne, with a sixth centre soon to open. The practice is committed to total family care and operates a mixed billing service providing both private and bulk billing options at its clinics for eligible patients. Q1 Medical takes appointment bookings over the phone augmented by AutoMed Systems for online bookings, helping patients find an available doctor or preferred GP at their local clinic.

After deciding to migrate to a cloud-based phone system in 2022, Q1 Medical suffered a catastrophic failure during the transition from a legacy PABX system to its new cloud solution in October. The cause was a lack of coordination between the two telephony service providers, and it took them five days to fully restore services, causing an estimated $50,000 in lost revenue across the five clinics.

After service restoration, Q1 Medical found that it was still missing calls, causing staff and patient frustration, which also resulted in some doctor attrition.

“The cloud telephony provider we were using failed to recognise the extent of calls we were receiving and the complexity in the call flows between our five centres. Every time something went wrong, they'd fix it, but it would mess up another configuration somewhere else,” said Adnan Hafeez, Operations Manager, Q1 Medical.

Professional Services the differentiator

Unhappy with the ongoing reliability and support of its cloud telephony solution, Q1 Medical shortlisted three other unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) platforms, including RingEX. While the systems offered similar functionality, the differentiator was the initial engagement from RingCentral’s Professional Services team, explained Hafeez: “we discussed all the problems we’d been having and what we wanted to achieve, and RingCentral’s engineers advised us on what solutions to deploy and what work arounds would be needed. The knowledge and support of RingCentral’s Professional Services team was great.”

Q1 Medical also checked with AutoMed Systems (its reception, back-office, and patient engagement solution) who confirmed that they already had many clients successfully using an integrated API connection with RingCentral.

INDUSTRY

Health Services

Melbourne, Australia

YEAR FOUNDED

2012

EMPLOYEES

10 out of 10 for communication

RingCentral’s Professional Services team also stood out during the design and deployment phases, with regular project meetings between stakeholders, and task allocation and timelines clearly laid out in the project plan.

“RingCentral kept us informed of any possible issues in advance, and when things were going to take place. I’d give RingCentral 10 out of 10 for communication,” said Hafeez.

The RingEX solution for voice and fax services was rolled out successfully in March 2023, with Q1 Medical able to manage most changes and fixes in-house, with RingCentral’s support services available if needed.

“I know that I have the whole RingCentral team behind me if I can't fix something. The saga we had with our phones is finally over; now we can pay full attention to our own organisation internally to improve our services to our staff, patients, and doctors,” said Hafeez.

RingCentral’s integration with AutoMed Systems means that if an existing patient calls, Q1 Medical reception and call centre staff are automatically presented with all their details, including Medicare and credit card details. That ensures appointments can be made easily, any claims and gap payments can be processed quickly and efficiently, and payments for telehealth consultations can be collected without having to call the patients back.

Call flows have been designed to switch calls between each clinic, and for two of the clinics to support each other to take incoming calls, with call centre staff from a different location supporting Q1 Medical’s busiest centre.

“Our customer service and patient satisfaction have significantly improved. We don’t get any complaints about our phones or answering calls anymore; now it's just about how hard it is to find an available time to book an appointment, which means our phone system is working!” said Hafeez.

Platform for future enhancements and growth

While Q1 Medical now has visibility on call flows and activity across the platform, the next steps will be to leverage the reporting and analytics in the system to gain greater insights on call statistics and caller behaviour. That way broader issues and efficiency opportunities can be identified and addressed by the practice staff themselves. That includes improving the time to answer and reducing the average call handling time.

Hafeez is confident in his ability to deploy telephony to Q1 Medical’s sixth centre when it opens, and to any more centres in the future: “we know RingCentral will be providing us with pre-configured handsets for our new site, so as far as assigning extensions, I can do that myself through our admin portal. Then it's a very simple process to connect these new handsets through either WiFi or direct cable connection, and our new phones are up and running.”