The Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust has signed a for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) contract with BT.
The telephony service will be rolled out on N3, the broadband network being implemented by BT for the NHS' National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The contract will cover three of the trust's sites and includes 280 Cisco handsets. All on-net calls will be free, while calls to mobiles will be on reduced tariffs.
"By converging our voice and data over the same single network we have delivered a simple, cost-effective and highly efficient way to manage our communications needs," said Kam Ryatt, associate director of ICT at the PCT said. "The N3 Hosted Voice Service acts as the icing on the cake - we will no longer need to worry about the day-to-day management of our telephony infrastructure - freeing up valuable resources that can be reinvested back into front line services."
The trust's IP infrastructure will run on the local Community of Interest Network (COIN), a high bandwidth network which links up 200 sites in Birmingham such as PCTs and doctors' surgeries.
The chief executive of the N3 Service Provider, Stuart Hill, said it was the first time healthcare information and communications systems were coming together to reduce costs and improve services. "This latest deployment is another step towards our vision of the N3 network becoming the number one transport mechanism for voice and data in the NHS," he said.
