Always available – even in an emergency

To be available, always and everywhere – that is extremely important for the around 1,450 employees of Vinzenz von Paul Hospitals gGmbH in Rottweil. The social and charitable institution provides a comprehensive range of inpatient, day-care and outpatient treatment options for the approximately 600,000 inhabitants of the service area between the Black Forest and the Swabian Alb. The clinic site with its about 30 buildings includes specialist clinics for general psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychosomatic medicine, addiction diseases, geriatric medicine and neurology. The hospital requires a special communication system to ensure that medical staff and other employees can be reached at all times and from all locations on the extensive grounds. This system must also offer employees security in the event of certain dangerous situations, such as an accident at work or physical assault by a patient.

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Until now, the hospital has used a PBX from Avaya, installed almost 20 years ago, in combination with a 30-year-old radio-based alarm system. The old system consisted almost completely of stationary desk telephones. „The change of the system had become necessary due to our provider‘s switch to All-IP,“ recalls Dieter Grimm, Technical Director of the Vinzenz von Paul Hospital. „In addition, support for the old alarm system had been cancelled.“ However, the old solution had not fully met the hospital‘s requirements anyway. While the PBX was not redundant, the old alarm system could not guarantee accessibility at all points of the hospital grounds. Thus, some employees were sometimes unable to receive calls when they were working in isolated locations, such as basements or underground supply corridors. For this reason, the existing telecommunications system was to be replaced by a modern VoIP solution with an integrated alarm system. In the future, employees should be able to make mobile phone calls throughout the entire hospital grounds. In addition, the new system was to be certified by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Unfallversicherung (DGUV) in accordance with the requirements of Vinzenz von Paul Hospital.

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Following a tender, IP Dynamics was commissioned to implement the new system. The joint project started in June 2018 and involved setting up an innovaphone virtual PBX (IPVA) including powerful VoIP gateways type IP6010 and IP3011 based on a virtualized environment. An area-wide DECT system from the manufacturer Ascom with 320 stations was also connected to the gateways, which in turn is linked to an Ascom Unite alarm server. Thus the DECT telephones of the D63 and D81 Protector series, with which the hospital staff on the hospital grounds can be reached at all times, also serve as alarm systems.

In general, important alarm messages are distributed as text messages and received via the DECT telephones. In the event of a personal emergency, employees now have two options for triggering an individual alarm. Either the alarm button on the telephone is actively pressed (deliberate alarm) or the alarm is automatically triggered under certain conditions (unintentional situation alarm). The terminals of the D81 series are permanently system-monitored. If one of these telephones can no longer be reached by radio (e.g. due to a low battery or because it is out of range), a notification of malfunction is automatically sent. In addition, an internal emergency number has been set up that can be reached from the entire hospital grounds. Anyone who calls the extension number to report a general emergency (for example, a fire, a missing person, or similar) is connected directly to the gate. The colleagues there have the opportunity to roughly locate the alarming device and then initiate appropriate measures.

The rollout, which was carried out in cooperation with Ascom, was completed in May 2020 after a project period of around two years. There was only a delay in between due to necessary cable work. „With a well thought-out migration concept, IP Dynamics has met our requirement to avoid any downtime at all costs,“ says Technical Director Dieter Grimm. The new system was rolled out step by step as part of a smooth migration, while the old system continued to operate for a transitional period.

Thanks to good communication, the cooperation between the colleagues from the technical and IT departments of Vinzenz von Paul Hospital and the contractors Ascom and IP Dynamics ran smoothly throughout. „We always met at eye level in the project team and completed the rollout hand in hand,“ sums up Alexander Besold, project manager at IP Dynamics.

Today almost 800 users are connected to the innovaphone VoIP system. The hospital‘s 15 external locations will also be switched over to the new system step by step. The previously used analogue Avaya telephones will be replaced by modern VoIP devices from innovaphone. IP112 telephones, which can be used in many different ways, are mainly used for this. Unlike the old system, the architecture of the new VoIP system is geo-redundant and therefore perfectly protected against possible failures. If a hospital building is affected by a power failure, for example, the gateway of another building takes over. And even if the unlikely scenario should occur that the entire communication platform should fail, the alarm system would still be functional.