CUSTOMER
Memorial Hermann Healthcare System of Houston(MHHS), is the largest community-based, not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas, consisting of 19 hospitals and specialty facilities located throughout the Houston metropolitan area. Memorial Hermann Hospital is a certified level-one trauma center, one of only two in the Greater Houston area, whose 12,000-plus employees provide 24-hour emergency and trauma care, including response to over 339,000 emergency visits a year.

PROBLEM
Steve Hagmaier, Director of Telecommunications for MHHS, had taken every action possible at a corporate level to reduce telecommunications costs. Further optimization of services and cost reductions were hampered by both the telephony infrastructure mixture of stand-alone, multi-vendor and multi-generation equipment, and the limited capabilities and level of usage detail provided by the telecom management systems.

Under the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA), health care industries are required to ensure patient confidentiality for all health care-related and patient information. The hospital had strict “no-modem” and “acceptable-use” policies in place, but means of enforcement was needed.

SOLUTION
SecureLogix’s ETM® System demonstrated a compelling projected financial return. Its telecom asset management capabilities during a 120-day TeleWatch Secure SM Assessment Service and ROI study, conducted at Memorial Hermann Hospital from mid-December, 2000 through mid-April, 2001. MHHS has since extended deployment of the ETM System to cover 6 member hospitals.

BENEFITS
According to Hagmaier, one of the primary benefits of the ETM System is the quantitative data it provides. The data collected by the ETM System (and some of the over 50 pre-defined reports) provided such visibility into the hospital’s voice network that the hospital recovered its investment in the System in less than one year. Examples of where cost savings were achieved:

•	Peak and average utilization reports revealed that optimization of service allowed a 10% reduction in capacity without affecting quality of service.
•	Detailed resource usage reports revealed that a great deal of the total telephone traffic was between member hospitals, and provided the objective data necessary to justify replacing 3 expensive local access trunks with 3 inter-hospital tie trunks.
•	Department-level usage reports facilitated departmental bill-back. And, as a result, departments began working to reduce their contribution to the total bill for their hospital.
•	Resource usage reports showing modem call activity revealed a level of unauthorized modem calls to ISPs such that Hagmaier estimated the same line could have been used for 4 voice calls during the average modem call.

Another primary benefit MHHS receives from the ETM System is the ability to enforce administrator-configured security policies to both eliminate unauthorized modem access to local ISPs, and limit the access of authorized modems to a pre-defined list of authorized users. This capability facilitates MHHS’s compliance with HIPPA by preventing unauthorized modem access to patient records, billing information, etc. on the data network. Additionally, by terminating the revealed volume of unauthorized modem calls to ISPs, more voice users can be served without bringing on additional trunks.

See the “Memorial Hermann Case Study” for a comprehensive account of the Memorial Hermann Hospital Return on Investment Study.