Port In A Storm

The hospital, serving 10 rural counties, needed to get up and running as soon as possible. Solution provider Relational Technology Solutions arrived to help with the cleanup and the restoration of communications.

Relational had been courting IT manager Mike Cottle and the Sumter hospital, pitching an Avaya VoIP solution to replace its aging phone system.

"About a week and a half before the tornado, we had lunch with Mike Cottle and a bunch of his team members. They're one of the accounts we touch base with a couple times a year to see how they're doing. Mike looked at me and said it would take something terrible to happen for my CFO to spend this amount of money," said Clyde Hill, national account manager at Relational, Columbus, Ohio.

After hearing about the storm, Hill and National Account Manager Justin Reynolds drove to Americus.

"Along the way, I was talking to Mike Cottle and some of the other guys at Sumter Regional. By this time it's 11:30 or 12 o'clock at night and none of them had seen how bad it was yet. They had tried to go up there and had been turned around by the police that had cordoned off the area," said Hill.

Shortly after 2 a.m., Hill and Reynolds got their first glimpse of what remained of the hospital. "I couldn't believe how bad it looked. We gave those guys an update and said we'd meet them back up there at 9 o'clock the next morning to see if we could help with anything," said Hill.

During their drive the night before, Reynolds and Hill spoke with Avaya to ask what could be done. "They were ready with product almost immediately. By the next morning they were ready to ship," said Reynolds.

The hospital's IT staff was ready to go once the solution provider had the system in hand.

"We wanted to get back on our feet as soon as we could, and we opened up an urgent care center within the first week or two after the storm. We needed to be able to communicate and I was not able to use the phone system that the hospital had. It was not destroyed but it was not designed to support multiple clinic-type environments," said Cottle.

Relational installed an Avaya VoIP system which includes S8710 servers running Avaya Communication Manager version 4.0, an Intuity LX voicemail system and a mix of Avaya gateways which includes the G650, G700 and G250. The solution provider got the main number, executive extensions and the hospital's pharmacy up and running on the VoIP system so that the community could again have access to health care and medication.

Sumter Regional eventually spread through 23 locations and hopes to have an interim 70-bed facility constructed by this fall. It will continue to use the Avaya VoIP system.

"Clyde and Avaya just hit the ground hard, and the phone system itself has been very easy for our users to get accustomed to. From a technical standpoint, my staff loves it because it's easy to administer and easy to deploy," said Cottle. "Suddenly everybody wants the Avaya phones. We're going to quickly get our money's worth out of the system."