Inflow Communications Completes a Five-year ShoreTel® Unified Communications Project for Silverton Hospital

Inflow Communications, the Northwest’s leading provider of ShoreTel® VoIP technology, recently completed migrating Silverton Hospital and all of it’s clinics to the ShoreTel phone system. Almost 5 years ago, Silverton Hospital and Inflow integrated a ShoreTel® VoIP phone system with their current Executone phone system and deployed ShoreTel to their newly-built Wellsprings facility in Woodburn, Oregon. Doing so gave Wellsprings the ability to take advantage of ShoreTel®’s Unified Communication features, while giving them the ability to conduct station-to-station dialing to their legacy PBX at the main hospital. Furthermore, it allowed Silverton to leverage their investment in the existing telecommunications infrastructure and migrate to ShoreTel® VoIP as their operational and financial needs allowed.

Over time, Inflow designed and installed ShoreTel at all Silverton clinics, while maintaining the integration to the core legacy phone system.  This year, over the period of 3 months, Inflow migrated the hospital to ShoreTel® VoIP on a department-by-department basis.

All of Silverton’s clinics and the main hospital are connected over an LS fiber optic network. For Public Switched Telephone access, the hospital uses 2 Primary Rate Interface (PRI’s) and the clinics leverage 46 SIP trunks over a 3MB connection at the Wellsprings facility. Additionally, each clinic and the hospital terminate standard analog trunks for local survivability and 911 access.

Silverton originally selected ShoreTel® as their Unified Communications platform of choice because of its modular and scalable platform, distributed intelligent architecture, and robust Business Continuity features. As with any medical facility, it is imperative that the Unified Communications design provides the absolute highest level of reliability and fault tolerance under all “failure” scenarios.

If any clinic loses connectivity to the network, they can continue to make and receive calls because each ShoreTel® appliance located at the clinics has the entire database burned into flash memory for 100% local call processing abilities. Each ShoreTel® appliance is rated “carrier-class” because they run on purpose-built Operating Systems (the same used in aviation-control equipment and pacemakers) and has no moving parts (except redundant fans). Additionally, Silverton installed a “spare” appliance on their network that can take over call processing duties should any appliance (at any site) become unavailable.

Silverton Hospital chose Inflow Communications as their vendor-of-choice because Inflow has the highest level of knowledge, experience, training, and customer service as it pertains to ShoreTel® Unified Communications technology in the industry.