Birmingham PCT embraces VoIP

Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust has appointed BT to provide a hosted VoIP phone service over the NHS’s N3 broadband network.

The N3 broadband network is being implemented by BT as part of the £12.4bn NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). It was upgraded in July to allow VoIP calls.

BT will provide VoIP over three sites for Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust. The system will include the provision of 280 Cisco handsets.

The trust will benefit from a Hosted Voice Service with a monthly rental fee. This will provide free on-net calls and cheaper calls to mobiles.

The system, which converges voice and data over the same network, will also improve communications efficiency.

It will allow the prioritisation of traffic across the network, with users able to designate voice as top priority, with less vital communications given a lower rating.

The trust’s IP infrastructure will run on the Birmingham and Solihull Community of Interest Network (COIN) - a high bandwidth network which connects 200 NHS sites in the region, including PCTs and doctors’ surgeries.