Case Study: Aspen Advisors Validates Telecom Plan for Saint Luke's Health System

Saint Luke's Health System consists of 11 hospitals and several primary and specialty care practices in the 67-county area surrounding Kansas City. The system provides a range of inpatient, outpatient, and home-care services. Founded as a faith-based, not-for-profit organization, its mission includes a commitment to the highest levels of excellence in healthcare and the advancement of medical research and education. It employs 8,300 people and has a medical staff of more than 1,200 physicians.

The Challenge Saint Luke's Health System had been working with its telecommunications vendor partners to develop a strategic telecommunications vision, plan, and roadmap to support its current and future business and technology goals. Their challenge was an aging population of PBX switches facing end-of-life vendor support. There was also the desire to converge voice and messaging platforms with future investments in a unified communications platform.

The Solution Aspen was engaged to review Saint Luke's telecommunications strategy and develop an executive summary. Specific objectives of the engagement included reviewing the telecommunications vendors' interview notes, discovery findings, and conclusions from the prior planning efforts; validating the drivers for the telecommunications strategy through a series of two workshops to discover the real linkage of current applications and systems, as well as future applications and systems; developing the linkage opportunities to Saint Luke's organizational strategy and goals; and revising the cost and ROI estimates for the telecommunications strategy based on phased transition of new services.