| I think everyone is overlooking two major issues in a hospital enviornment. 1-Wireless mobile stations and WiFi communications then 2 - The seperate video costs of the ISDN lines that are sure to be eating up huge chunks of money each month.
With that I will tell you that replacing Centrex and putting in your own system will save you money even if you totally get taken by a contractor. The costs of Centrex are just out-of-bounds with regards to new IP Tel systems.
Go look at a product by Vocera Communications. We have 2 hospitals as clients and both use it in conjunction with the IP Tel system we installed (Cisco) We had started with WiFi phones from Cisco but the Vocera product offered a tone of functionality from login, to paging, to messaging all voice activated and using the same AP's that the mobile workstations were using. Encryption was very high and everything flowed right into the metadirectory project in IT.
The project will be huge no matter what you do, but if you spend your money on traditional PBX infrastructure this late in the life cycle, then you might as well keep the centrex for another year and wait until something else convinces you to go IP. I'm a Cisco guy, but I would rather have you put in Avaya IP Tel or even Mitel (though I would say they are not fitted for an outfit of your size) before seeing you handcuff the hospital with a traditional PBX for the next decade.
And the guy who wants to sell you Centrex IP........yeah, don't you think broadband VoIP is a bit of a streatch for 1000 hospital users with communication needs that require adherence to HIPPA regulations? Asking them to allow any network access to an IP Centrex provider will cause more security headaches than can be saved in administrative headaches of a hosted solution. IP Centrex is not mature enough to handle a project of this magnitude. Once the comm system is on the network the hospital will see all of the added benefits of network integration, data hooks, xml services, mobility, and quite uniquely, E911 ability of a system that can manage itself. |