APS Health Care

Less is more when implementing Call Management Systems

About APS

APS Healthcare is a managed behavioral health organization that provides managed behavioral health, employee assistance programs (EAP), and specialty care management services to more than 9 million people in the United States and Puerto Rico. Their customers include corporate employers, HMOs (commercial, Medicaid, Medicare and point-of-service), unions, PPOs, indemnity plans and public sector programs.

Customer Situation:

APS was growing and needed to add two new call centers in Atlanta and Hawaii, while keeping its command center in Bethesda, Maryland. The existing system for call management was inadequate. Reporting was spotty, and to create a coherent report for management, data from the various call centers required manual consolidation. Calls could not overflow as needed from one call center to another. The management team was at a crossroads. They could add a new call management system for each of the two new sites, perpetuating the problems of the existing system with its flawed reporting capabilities. Or they could meet the challenge head on, eliminating redundancies and building a strong centralized call management process for the future.

S1 Solution

S1 linked all the call centers in Bethesda, Atlanta, Missoula, Hawaii and Puerto Rico with an efficient call management system, the Avaya CMS R9 Sun Blade 100 with high availability.

S1 provided APS staff the simplicity and toll savings of four-digit dialing between Atlanta, Maryland and Missoula through the use of IP trunking over frame relay and multiple C-LAN and media processing cards.

And using IP trunking and the Atlanta site’s existing Wide Area Network, S1 provided centralized voicemail for Atlanta, saving APS approximately $40,000.

APS benefits

By partnering with S1, APS now enjoys seamless central reporting from all the call centers, improving management’s ability to quickly assess overall trends and make decisions accordingly. They are positioned to save money through the elimination of a T1 line, and through the new 4-digit dialing capability built on the existing data infrastructure. And with the Atlanta site designated for redundancy and duplication, high availability is now a certainty.

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