For more than a decade, healthcare operations have been urged by oversight bodies and related industries to migrate from traditional paper-based methods of record keeping to paperless or electronic documentation.
As with any change in how business is conducted and services are rendered, this has presented numerous challenges to the healthcare industry. Electronic medical records, called EMRs and often interchangeably referred to as electronic health records or EHRs, have taken hold in practices and hospitals across the country. However, implementation to date has been slow and somewhat haphazard.
While healthcare operations have automated information like patient care notes, billing and scheduling, information generated from phone-based communications has remained largely relegated to the notepad method used since telecommunications became widespread more than a century ago.
An overview of electronic medical records in healthcare Simply stated, an electronic medical record is a medi..

Last Week in Business Communications is a weekly post where we cover some of the notable articles and happenings in the business communication world from the week before. Check back each Monday for your news fix.
DDoS attacks
On Tech CrunchHow massive DDoS attacks are undermining the Internet. Read the article >
Brexit: the UK’s IT skills, innovation, and investment challenge starts now!
On UC InsightSkills and innovation will remain a key challenge for a post-European Britain, which is itself at risk of breaking up still further into its constituent nations, each of which will compete for the same business and the same skilled people. Read the article >
6 small steps to digital transformation
On Info WorldBoiling the ocean never works. But the right proof of concept can provide a key transformative example for your entire organization. Read the article >

Meetings. Everyone has them. Not everyone likes them. Not everyone does well at them. But no matter how amazing you are at holding meetings, and no matter how good your conference room tech is, there’s always a human element at play. And it’s the human element that can derail your meeting before it’s even started—as early as booking the room.
If you’ve worked in an office you know the feeling—standing outside the door, tapping your feet, wondering if the people in the conference room that you booked are going to leave. Valuable minutes tick by, and before you know it, the delays cascade through your company like winter weather holding up flights at an airport.
Conference room jacking This is one of the simplest, and probably most common, conference booking faux pas. This one is simple. You just show up to a room that you haven’t booked and you take possession of it. After all, possession is nine tenths of the law, right? In truth, using a vacant conference room isn’t a problem in and..

Quick question: When you need to provide a customer an update on a scheduled service call, what do you do?
Pick up the phone and call the customer Send a text message to the customer You might think that customers want to hear a live person telling them what to expect, providing answers to their questions and perhaps giving a little reassurance.
Actually, most customers don't want a call. They’d prefer a text message.
And if you're in the field services business, that turns out to be very good news, as we'll explain.
They don't want to talk…because? It may seem surprising that messages are preferred to calls because, for many of us, a phone call just seems more personal. But respondents to several surveys on the topic provide a lot of good reasons why customers like messages more.
For them, messages:
Take less time. They get the information they need and move on. Are less disruptive. There's no requirement to drop everything to check a message, as ther..

Last Week in Business Communications is a weekly post where we cover some of the notable articles and happenings in the business communication world from the week before. Check back each Monday for your news fix.
G.fast broadband proving popular among European operators
On Computer Weekly Ahead of Broadband World Forum, an Ovum report reveals high levels of interest in G.fast delivery technology, particularly among major European operators with large copper networks. Read the article >
Determining the worth of your SaaS company
On Tech Crunch The reality is, it's not all that hard to get a quick read on your SaaS company's valuation. The two most important things to know are: What are public SaaS companies “going for” at the time, and how fast is your business growing relative to its peers. Read the article >
Cloud computing's true value can't be measured in dollars
On Info World Companies are moving to the cloud to save money, but in doing so, they're miss..

In this video blog, Mitel’s General Manager for Contact Center Brian Spencer looks at the benefits of cloud-based contact center infrastructure for dynamic businesses that are growing organically, through mergers and acquisitions, or through global expansion.
Video transcript: I’m Brian Spencer, Mitel’s General Manager for Contact Center. I want to talk to you for a moment about the cloud and the impact cloud can have on your customer experience center.
What’s a customer experience center? We’re talking about the people that are engaging with your customers on a regular basis, providing customer service or maybe sales support and assistance, maybe product support. Maybe, if you’re a municipality, the people are engaging with your constituents to give them access to services and answer informational calls. It’s the folks in your business that are constantly interacting with your customers or constituents. Watch Don’t Call it a Call Center to learn more >
Now, what does the cloud have..

“Mitel’s MiVoice and MiCollab are simply the way we work now – the mobile enterprise is completely enabled. Without these solutions I don’t see how we’d be able to be as effective or productive. Since the solution is in the cloud, people can do their jobs from anywhere, which truly changes the way we work.”- Patrice Belie, CEO, Hub One
Hub One, a subsidiary of Groupe ADP (Aéroport de Paris), is a telecom operator and integrator of mobile and tracking solutions for 4500 enterprises of differents sectors in France and supporting 95 million passengers per year across three Parisian airports in France (Roissy Charles de Gaulle, Orly, and Le Bourget), as well as in shopping malls and campuses, and another 70 million passengers per year through the Amsterdam airport.
More recently, by leveraging its experience in airport environments and partnering with companies like Mitel, Hub One grew beyond the airport market and expanded to other vertical markets. For business telephony and unified c..

Last Week in Business Communications is a weekly post where we cover some of the notable articles and happenings in the business communication world from the week before. Check back each Monday for your news fix.
Why it takes a cloud service to manage cloud services
On Info WorldChances are, your business already uses multitudes of cloud services and integrates with many more. How do you manage them all? These services can help. Read the article >
Stickers emerge as EU's weapon against dud IoT security
On The RegisterWhitegoods-inspired security rating scheme under discussion. Read the article >
Security industry failing users, says behaviour expert
On Computer WeeklyThe information security community is failing to educate users in a way that helps then understand cyber threats and change their behaviour, according to consultant Jessica Barker. Read the article >

Good, fast or cheap: Pick two.
That familiar expression – known as the Iron Triangle – has been accepted wisdom for the trade-offs of completing a project. But changes in technology are showing that this assumption is no longer true. You now can provide services or offer products that meet a customer's speed and quality requirements while keeping your operational costs in line. Embedded communication is one good example. Let's take a look at how this fast-growing technology is making the old paradigm obsolete—and how your field services company (and other types of companies) can benefit from it.
The limits of analog technology The Iron Triangle rule can be illustrated with a home renovation project. You can get a quick, cheap kitchen remodel, but to do so you probably would have to employ low-skilled workers willing to take less pay or use cheaper materials. Conversely, you might get a beautiful remodel, but will likely have to pay more for high-skilled contractors and bett..

You probably already know that businesses are adopting video conferencing technology at rapid pace. MarketsandMarkets recently projected that the enterprise video market, which includes video conferencing systems, will reach $36.8 billion by 2020.
In fact, more than 54 percent of employees regularly take part in work-related video conferences, but not all of them are eager participants, according to a recent report.
So why are roughly half of employees hesitant to turn on their cameras for work meetings? There are plenty of causes, but here are five of the most common reasons keeping employees from using videoconferencing software.
1. Multi-tasking While meeting holders would prefer to think everyone on their call is giving the meeting their full attention, the reality is usually much different.
Meeting attendees are replying to emails, preparing presentations, eating lunch, and doing other work while (hopefully) muted on conference calls. If the same people joined a video call o..