Healthcare
PSS customers in healthcare include one of the nation’s largest health insurers, one of the largest managed care providers, and two of the largest providers of healthcare IT services.
Support Services for a Healthcare Provider
After two years of near-perfect service, the PSS FlexxGate Media Gateways deployed at a major healthcare provider were discovered to have a large number of hung SIP channels associated with calls that did not properly tear down. Fortunately the N+1 failover redundancy PSS engineered into the customer's network prevented the problem from affecting any customer calls, but the condition did cause a memory issue that eventually would have rendered the system unresponsive had it not been detected.
While rebooting every few months might have been an easy solution to prevent the memory leak from getting out of hand, PSS considered this to be an unacceptable bug that had to be fixed. PSS also did not want the customer to bear the burden of the constant monitoring necessary to reproduce and trace a problem that occurred so infrequently. Immediately PSS began continuously monitoring the system online in real time. This allowed PSS to pinpoint the problem and install a fix within days of the problem being reported.
The outcome: a potentially serious problem was detected and fixed without a single call dropped on the self-service or contact center platforms.
Speech-enabled VoiceXML Upgrade for Healthcare Provider
A very large prescription and healthcare services company engaged PSS to provide a fully speech-enabled VoiceXML upgrade to their legacy touch-tone IVR. As part of the upgrade, they wanted a more robust integration to back-end systems so callers could have easier access to health and prescription information, refills, billing, and general services through the IVR. The customer had already implemented web services on the back end that would be made available to the new IVR applications to be developed by PSS.
During this detailed discovery phase, PSS leaned that some of the project's initial assumptions about the available web services were incorrect. The web services already implemented by the customer were not robust enough to support all of the functionality expected in the new IVR system.
Instead of triggering weeks of additional custom integration work to compensate, PSS introduced FlexxBridge Integration Server to "bridge the gap" between the customer's existing back end system interfaces and the transaction requirements of the new IVR application. Despite the additional integration requirements that surfaced during the discovery phase, FlexxBridge allowed the project to meet the original deployment schedule and remain very close to the originally agreed-upon budget.
FlexxGate Adapts Quickly to Healthcare Provider's Nonstandard H.323 Integration
A "Top 5" health insurance provider engaged PSS to deploy IP-based Genesys IVR systems at their facilities. The customer had a deadline to meet, and needed the systems to go live within two weeks. The original plan was to use the customer's existing Cisco 5400 gateways to convert T1 lines and H.323 from their Avaya switches to SIP for the new IP-IVR.
After the first week, PSS had 100% of the IP-IVR systems installed and running, awaiting presentation of SIP from the customer’s existing gateways. With the deployment deadline looming and the existing gateways still not presenting SIP properly (Avaya's H.323 was a nonstandard implementation), PSS proposed using FlexxGate Media Gateways instead. In contrast to leading off-the-shelf voice gateways, PSS designed FlexxGate so it could be quickly and easily adapted to meet very specific customer requirements.
Within five days, PSS developed a nonstandard Avaya H.323 implementation for FlexxGate and had it deployed in the customer's network. Thought the solution was implemented four years ago, the customer has been delighted with FlexxGate's performance and is still using it as their primary interface to their Genesys IP-IVRs today.