Vinzenz von Paul Hospital

The ini­tial sit­u­a­tion

The Vinzenz von Paul Hos­pi­tal in Rot­tweil is an impor­tant psychiatric-​neurological com­pe­tence cen­ter with a ser­vice area of more than 600,000 inhab­i­tants. The insti­tu­tion has about 1,450 employ­ees and offers a dense care net­work with 467 hos­pi­tal beds, 129 day clinic places, 343 nurs­ing home places, var­i­ous ambu­lant ser­vices, five psy­chi­atric insti­tute ambu­lances and a work place for men­tally hand­i­capped peo­ple.

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.

The chal­lenge

• 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 old solu­tion did not meet the require­ments of the hos­pi­tal because the PBX was not redun­dant and the old alarm sys­tem could not guar­an­tee acces­si­bil­ity at all points of the hos­pi­tal grounds.
• 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.

The solu­tion

• An inno­va­phone vir­tual PBX (IPVA) includ­ing pow­er­ful VoIP gate­ways of type IP6010 and IP3011 was set up 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.
• 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.
• If employ­ees trig­ger an alarm, the respon­si­ble col­leagues can locate the alarm­ing device and ini­ti­ate appro­pri­ate mea­sures.

The result

• The roll­out, which was car­ried out in coop­er­a­tion with Ascom, was com­pleted in May 2020.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

If you are also inter­ested in a mod­ern VoIP solu­tion with inte­grated alarm sys­tem, do not hes­i­tate to con­tact us.