Client Challenge

Solent NHS Trust is a community and mental health provider, delivering person-centric care from multiple hospitals in the southern region of the UK. At the core of the Trust’s digital strategy is an integrated care system that delivers service excellence for the end-user.
In July 2022, Atos was awarded a three-year contract with Solent to support its IT infrastructure and accelerate its digital journey. As part of this wider transformation initiative, an integral step in the journey was upgrading Solent’s telecom network.
The existing solution was based on legacy on-site telephony systems that were out-of-support and in need of replacement. What Solent needed was a new system that would facilitate more agile ways of working and provide secure communications across the Trust.

Solution

Following collaborative discussions between Atos and Solent, we suggested implementing an end-to-end cloud-hosted MS Teams telephony solution that would replace all legacy telephony systems.

The project covered three critical areas:

• MS Teams was installed on all employee laptops
• Yealink handsets were deployed around the hospitals and integrated with MS Teams to replace the legacy PBX system
• The switchboard and operator consoles in the hospital reception and call centres were also migrated to MS Teams

After smoothly migrating more than 6 000 employees to the new solution, we then worked with Solent to refine their call forwarding plans and policies to ensure that every call would be directed seamlessly to an available line.

Business benefits

At the conclusion of the project the Trust had a single, unified telephony system serving its employees — everyone from the receptionists on the switchboard to the teams in the hospital call centres.

By deploying a holistic, integrated solution across the full end-to-end process, Solent now has a single support centre for the entire telephony service, rather than multiple vendors managing isolated components. This way, the process is far easier to manage logistically and provides a more seamless and consistent end-user experience for the employees.

Overall, rolling-out MS Teams has also allowed Solent to remove their legacy telephony system, generating cost efficiencies for the Trust and giving them the potential to explore additional functionality in the future.