Webinars • Jan 23, 2020 • 35 MIN PLAY • ON-DEMAND

What's your Prognosis? Don’t Let a Bug Take Down Your UC Platform

Jon Kremkau
Jon Kremkau

Account Manager @ IR

Tim Poindexter
Tim Poindexter

VP of Marketing @ IR

Josh Stuart
Josh Stuart

Solution Engineer @ IR

Details

Transcript

Just as people need proactive regular check-ups to ensure they stay in good health, it’s important for hospitals to proactively manage the health and performance of their communications environment to set them up for long-term high performance.

IR Prognosis provides real-time insight into the key health indicators of your communications ecosystem and can even provide guidance on how to address any problems that are identified.

Whether you’re preparing for open enrollment, upgrading your telemedicine capabilities, or working on future enhancements to deliver better experiences for patients, learn how Prognosis real-time performance management can help you keep your finger on the pulse.

IR | BrightTALK

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Tim Poindexter: Hello, my name is Tim Poindexter. I'm so glad that you've joined us today. Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening for you, whether you're joining us live or On-Demand, we are so happy to have you on our webinar! Today we're going to be talking about Prognosis and monitoring unified communications in a healthcare environment. 

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With me this morning, I have Jon Kremkau, a Territory Account Manager here at IR, with a lot of experience working with hospitals and clinics and other healthcare organizations. As well as Josh Stuart, a Solutions Engineer, with a great depth of technical expertise across our various solutions. So I'm pleased to have both of them with me here this morning.

Before we get started, I'm going to run through a few webinar logistics. 

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  • The slides are available for download under the attachments tab

We have made the slides from this presentation available for download under the “Attachments and Links” tab. 

  • Visit the UC Monitoring for Healthcare page for more resources

You can also visit the “UC Monitoring for Healthcare” page for additional resources. That link is available in the “Attachment and Links” tab as well. And if you download the attachment, you'll be able to find a link in the attached slides to that page as well. You can visit that page for additional resources, blog posts, a nice infographic, etc. And if you're interested in learning more, schedule a tailored discovery meeting with us to kind of go through your own unique set of challenges and how we might be able to help you -- you'll be able to request a meeting from that page.

  • Have a question? Send it through and we’ll go through them at the end

Should you have any questions during this webinar, feel free to ask questions through the “Feedback from the Audience” button. We'll be reviewing that throughout the presentation and try to get to the questions at relevant points. If we're unable to get to your question during this live webinar, we will reach out to you at the end and see how we can help.

  • Polls -- Please share your opinion

We will be running a poll during the webinar. So we always like to get feedback and insight from our audience. And when that poll comes up, we'll release it and we'd love to have you share your opinion with us.

  • Go Full Screen for better viewing

On the webinar screen, there is the ability to go full screen. We do plan on sharing some demo screens from our environment a little bit later. The full screen will just allow you to view things a little bit better, and see things in a little bit better detail. So definitely take advantage of that if you can.

  • Webinar will be available On Demand -- Share with your colleagues!

Finally, this webinar will be available On Demand after we're finished. If you want to watch it again, just to kind of dust-up a section that maybe you thought was important and wanted more detail on, you can do that or you can always share it with your colleagues. 

  • Please rate the webinar and share feedback to help us improve

We would also like you to rate the webinar and share feedback. We're always trying to improve and we take the feedback very seriously.

Before we jump in, I just wanted to make sure that everybody has some idea of who we are.

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We've been around for 30+ years. We’re publicly listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, they are based here in Denver, Colorado. We have over a thousand enterprise customers worldwide. We have some of the largest Fortune 500 customers who use our set of solutions. And a number of large healthcare organizations are a part of that -- St. Luke's, Banner Health, Humana, etc.

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Our two primary solution areas are:

  • performance monitoring and
  • management for unified communications. 

And we do something similar for payment switches. Today, of course, we're going to be talking about unified communications and the context of the healthcare environment.

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It's important for you to know if you're using Cisco, or Avaya, or Microsoft, or some combination of those three technologies, that we have fantastic relationships with all of those vendors. Those vendors, of course, they're providing the leading unified communications technologies. And we work really closely with them to make sure that our software can monitor the performance of each of those platforms -- whether it's a single platform solution, or a multi-platform solution, which is quite common across broad healthcare organizations who might be acquiring other hospitals or clinics or things like that. They frequently end up having a lot of technologies that are there. So we're certified, we're partners, and we work really closely with each of these mentors.

Alright, so I'm going to pass it over to our primary presenter for today, Mr. Jon Kremkau. Jon, take it away.

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Jon Kremkau: Thanks so much, Tim. So this morning we're going to talk about and discuss some of the industry trends in regards to UC challenges in the healthcare segment. So how the technology has evolved with telemedicine show you actually how we perform and help stabilize your UC collaboration platform, and become more proactive versus reactive when it comes to performance monitoring, leveraging Prognosis in your UC environment. 

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So Prognosis provides real-time insight and key health indicators for your UC communication ecosystem. So today, we're going to go through some different trends, look at some different aspects that we're seeing in the industry, and talk about some of the details in regards to how Prognosis can help out in the healthcare segment.

So, some of the key trends that we see with IR along with our key partners, as Tim mentioned, is the increase in telemedicine. According to the telehealth index, telemedicine has gone up by about 340%. We see these challenges in the marketplace, and we see acquisitions between different healthcare providers. Here recently, we've seen companies that we've been working with for two years, they get purchased by another healthcare provider, and then another one, and we've got three customers that are basically merged into one single customer now. So we are seeing a lot of acquisitions in regards to that. 

During these phases of integrating the different technologies between the different companies or companies being acquired, obviously, you have to deal with the technology, the people, and the increase in trying to keep patient satisfaction stable while you're merging these technologies together, the people and cultures. Healthcare providers should maintain as much patient satisfaction as possible -- retaining their data, looking at insurance information, having people calling into the healthcare provider, you want to maintain that level of satisfaction for the patient.

Tim Poindexter: Jon, I just want to jump in on that one really quickly since I was talking to a customer the other day and they were talking about this challenge. They were part of a parent company that was basically trying to expand their healthcare provider footprint through inorganic growth. They were bringing on a number of different hospitals, and what their challenge was that they wanted to maintain or increase the level of service that they were providing. 

From a technology point of view, at least in communications, that meant their core technology was Cisco, and they just acquired a group of hospitals that are all on Avaya. They needed to make sure that they could troubleshoot and maintain the quality of service across their communications environment, through all of those things and see everything in one pane of glass. So we were talking about how Prognosis allowed them to see all of their Cisco phones, and all of their Avaya phones in one place. And to make sure that they didn't get out of sync and have problems on the Avaya side that they weren't able to see as quickly.

And so this was a tool that they're using to help them manage those multi-vendor technologies that were growing as a result of this acquisition strategy. That's something I've heard over and over again, and if you happen to be in that situation, I think, the Prognosis is in a unique place to help you get a view across all of those technologies and deliver the level of service that your patients, administrators, and everyone else involved, expect and demand.

Jon Kremkau: I appreciate that, Tim, you’re absolutely right. We've seen multiple examples of companies that have multi-platforms, you know, “How are we going to merge an Avaya environment, and a Cisco environment?” “How do we look at adoption and usage and migration to these different platforms?” And Prognosis provides all the insight to that. So I appreciate you bringing that up.

Going on to the next slide here. Another key trend that we're seeing, along with our partners, again, with Cisco and Avaya, are the different types of devices and options that are available to patients as we become more mobile as more devices are introduced into the UC platform. As you can see, there are different types of medical pods now, doing appointments at home on your phone.

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As I mentioned before, the increase in telemedicine is about 340%, between 2015 and 2019. And again, 69% of physicians said they were willing to actually try telemedicine to offer additional services to their patients. Not everybody can get into the hospital and make the trip there. And because physicians can be more flexible, because they can offer schedules that are outside of work hours or on weekends or even 24/7, it's making it easier for them to see more patients and provide more services to their patients without having to physically be in the room with them. 

Some of the key trends that we're seeing is as this new technology is brought into the UC environment, again, as Tim mentioned, how are we utilizing Prognosis as a single pane of glass to monitor those devices, make sure the customer experience or patient experience is stable or even better than it should be. And that's what Prognosis will help you do.

Tim Poindexter: I want to chime in actually with a personal story on this real quick, if you don't mind. This telemedicine thing can be really, really powerful. I have a young daughter, she bumped her head, that was probably six or seven months ago. We thought she was okay, but given how young she was, and she wasn't quite talking as well as we would have liked it because she was so young, she couldn't quite tell us how she was feeling. We weren't sure if we needed to go to urgent care or an ER, or if she was okay. 

And so what I did was I called into one of these telemedicine providers. And it used my iPhone, put it on FaceTime, and talked to the doctor. Kind of showed her what my daughter was acting like, and how she looked. And I was really excited about the potential of this because it meant that I could probably save a little bit of money, and time, and have some reassurance and know what to do. But the problem was the audio from the doctor was a little bit choppy. I kept having to sort of interrupt her and say, “What was that?” or “What were you saying?” And it ended up actually being pretty frustrating. Because I wasn't quite sure what she was saying, and whether or not we needed to go to urgent care, or everything was okay. And I think if the experience had been a little bit better, I would probably rely on telemedicine a little bit more going forward and similar situations. 

But because of that experience, I lost a little bit of confidence in whether telemedicine is something I would want to turn to again in the future. And if that's happened to me, I imagine it's probably happened to a number of people. And as organizations are trying to leverage this new technology to lower their costs, deliver a better quality of care, and just kind of be people where they're at, they're going to need to solve those problems. If telemedicine is going to get the sort of adoption that that healthcare organizations are pushing for to get. 

And I think our monitoring software is in a unique position to help organizations identify the sorts of issues. Whether it's hardware or software, that can lead to those problems on telemedicine. We can give people insights and they can fix the choke points, they can get to the root cause, identify any problems there and address it. So the experience that patients have with telemedicine is what's intended.

Jon Kremkau: Perfect. Yeah, thank you, Tim. Absolutely. And then to add to that, you know, the travel time to make appointments, to go sit in a waiting room, to potentially be exposed to other people that may be sick. You know, you obviously reduce that risk from the patient side and healthcare provider side as well, by saving time, by not spreading contagious diseases or being exposed to certain things. So I think there's a lot of benefits to doing that. But to your point, Tim, that first experience that you have is going to kind of determine how you move forward. So it is important that you have the ability to monitor proactively any challenges in the UC platform so that they can be fixed real-time versus having somebody to call in or complain about an issue and what have you experienced.

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So as we move forward, this is a kind of a pinwheel of Prognosis and the different platforms and applications we support. So as we discussed on the previous slide, as healthcare providers are looking at acquisitions, merging and integrating different applications and environments together. Prognosis supports a variety of different platforms and UC applications. So whether it's Avaya, Microsoft, Cisco, call recording with Nice and Verint, the different types of SBC out there for SIP trunks monitoring and communication. We provide monitoring, alerting, and notifications for all these different platforms with threshold so that we can proactively look at the environment and make intelligent decisions, and provide notification, provide alerts so that we can proactively take care of any issues that are going on in the environment before somebody can even call in and open up a ticket or a case that something may be going on in the environment.

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So as we look at some of the UC challenges that are out there, as you bring these new technologies together when you have multiple platforms, different devices that are being introduced into the environment itself. We basically see a level of complexity now, that becomes more complex, obviously, in the UC environment. So you have multiple platforms, you have multiple call centers now -- that can be different types of call centers. “How do we integrate those together?” “What is the user option and technology rollout, challenges and goals?” And of course, the ability to actually manage your software and hardware inventory. You know, how do you maintain all of those things, look at the physical inventory, look at the software licenses, while trying to reduce the overall cost as you're looking at these different aspects. 

So we do see quite a bit of the challenge here. Of course, Prognosis allows us to really have full visibility, real-time into all of these challenges, that we'll go into a little bit deeper and show you how we can provide support and address these challenges in these environments.

So, Tim, I think we're going to take a poll to the audience. 

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Tim Poindexter: Right, we have our first poll question here. I'm going to pull up this poll and release it to everyone. So all right, the question is, and it should have just gone out.

“What are your greatest challenges regarding your UC healthcare environment?” And we listed five options:

  1. Rolling Out Telemedicine Capability, perhaps you are in a position of overseeing an initiative to kind of roll out some technology to support telemedicine. 
  2. Maybe you already have telemedicine and it's under your remit to improve the performance. Maybe there's been some complaints or you've identified that enough people are using service and it gets bogged down. 
  3. Perhaps you have a contact center and patients are calling in to make appointments, or family members are calling to reach their other family members who are patients and they're in different places throughout a hospital, for example. You want to try to make sure that your IVR is configured correctly, and that your contact center can flex with shifting demand. 
  4. Perhaps you've acquired other clinics, hospitals, other healthcare organizations, and you have some technology that you need to integrate and get a single view in one place. 
  5. And then the last option is improving UC Inventory Management and Executive Reporting. You might have some administrators who want to understand license inventory and said inventory. 

Jon, you were telling me an interesting story about how sometimes patients in these hospital rooms steal stuff. Like they'll take a phone, and they'll take it because they're like, “Gosh, I'm spending thousands of dollars to be here. I'm going to take this.” Which kind of blew my mind. I didn't realize that that was an actual issue that people deal with that I think you were mentioning that with this inventory management, hospitals can sort of keep track of the different hardware that's in place across their UC environment.

Jon Kremkau: Exactly. Yeah. Well, we'll go over that in just a second and actually show you what you've seen and kind of what's been going on after this poll, and then talk a little bit about that, absolutely.

Tim Poindexter: Okay. All right. So go ahead and share your vote if you haven't already. I am going to stop voting here momentarily. So please make a selection. If one of these things fits your challenges. We'd love to hear your feedback, and we'll keep it.

All right, it looks like the highest vote right now is improving telemedicine performance, which is good to see. I'm going to stop voting. And, Jon, let's pass it back to you. And keep moving.

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Jon Kremkau: Perfect. Thanks so much, Tim. So as Tim mentioned, in regards to the inventory management and license management, one thing we have been seeing with a lot of our customers in this particular segment is we have a lot of phones out there. We have a lot of devices, we're not sure what versions are out there. If somebody was to walk in or if an executive would say, “Hey, how many phones do we have?” “Are they up to date?” “Are they in compliance?” “Can you provide this report to me?” 90% of those people would say, “Yes, possibly, but it's going to take me some time.” 

With Prognosis, that information is available to you real-time, on-demand. You can take that and actually see the real-time information exported out to an Excel spreadsheet, in a formatted fashion so it's very easily read. All of that information is available on-demand or we can actually automate that process for you.

Because Prognosis can provide firmware versions, clients within the versions that they're supposed to be on, in regards to Cisco phones, or Cisco Jabber users, we can provide all the information to how many devices, what versions they're on, and even set up alerts and notifications, if they go out of compliance. So it's really about having a real-time snapshot of your UC environment at any given time, or automating that for benchmarking and actually cost savings as you move forward and either migrate companies together through acquisitions or just grow naturally.

And to Tim's point, we've met with quite a few healthcare providers. And these people feel that “Hey, as much as I'm paying for my visit here to the hospital, I might as well just take the analog phone and put it in my bag and take it home.” But because there's compliance and other regulatory issues out there, they have to provide a phone in each of the rooms. But if a phone's not registered in a certain location, or phone is not registered, we can actually run reports to say, “Hey, out of 50,000 phones, only 49,000 actually registered.” So there's 1000 missing out there. So we have the ability to actually go and do a snapshot look at the environment, make sure the licensing is correct. 

We had another customer that was paying for thousands of software licenses that they should not have been really paying for because they weren't being utilized. So it's just another example of being able to monitor proactively. See the environment but also understand the different devices and software license associated with your UC environment, and have that information available at any given time.

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So one of the other examples that we were going to talk about today is in regards to video usage and adoption. So as we see these intelligent devices being introduced into the UC platform, we're also seeing how are the video devices, or how is the collaboration happening with the usage or adoption. So because millions of dollars are being spent on this new technology, we have the ability to go out there and, again, see what devices are out there. We can see how the usage has been on those devices or the adoption rate on those We can see the quality of service. Is there an issue, like Tim mentioned, is there an issue with voice or there's voice, and no video or video but no voice? We can see all of that real-time proactively alert on that. And be able to track down the root cause very quickly and have that fixed. 

If certain devices are put in areas that aren't being utilized, the goal is to run these reports and say, “Hey, these different devices aren't being utilized correctly. Let's move them to a different region, building location, whatever it may be, to better utilize the technology that we have.” Which ultimately should give a better experience to those who are using it, and also help reduce some of the cost of the investment that's already been made.

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So one of the last things we're going to talk about today, from my point of view, before we get into a demo with Josh, is some of the testing services that we have available. So with testing services, we have the ability to actually call from the outside in, really the Customer Experience Testing services that we provide is a cloud-based service. 

So for example, we have the HeartBeat™ Experience, we have the ability to call in 24/7 - 365 to actually make sure that when patients, or your customers, or partners, or vendors, or whoever it may be are calling into your environment, that your lines are up and running and validated all the time. If there's an issue with anything along those lines, we proactively alert on that. So really, we're making sure that your environment is healthy, it's up and running. And if there is a blip on the radar or something's happened, within minutes, you can find out what's going on where the breakdown is or the root cause and we'll be able to actually show you where that is that you can go out and remediate that issue. 

With StressTest™, the same thing, whether it be a critical emergency that's out there or open enrollment, there's all sorts of situations where unfortunately things happen and thousands of calls are made into different locations or, or hospitals. You’ve got to make sure that when people are calling in, they're not getting busy lines that are being dropped, you want to make sure your environment is up and running and stable all the time. So certain types of load tests or stress tests that we can provide as a service to you are available.

And really with that, you know, the last thing I'll mention is the Agent Interaction. So we have the ability, with our testing services, to call in, as Tim mentioned before. When I call into a certain provider or certain clinic or hospital, I'm able to go through the IVR, I'm able to get to somebody, hopefully not get disconnected throughout that whole process. So with that being said, we can test that whole process, validate those different steps. And if it breaks during the way, we'll be able to tell you, “On step five, it broke. This is why it failed.” And provide the information to go ahead and fix that. So the customer’s experience as they’re calling into the environment is at a higher satisfaction than what it's expected to be, based on what you're wanting out of your UC environment.

So we want to make sure that we maintain and provide that level of service for patients, customers, vendors, anybody who might be interacting with others within the organization.

Tim Poindexter: So with that, I'll hand it over to Josh, who's going to run through a demo of some of the use cases that we spoke about today. And Josh, I'll hand it over to you.

Josh Stuart: Excellent job. Excellent job, Jon. Tim, thank you very much. 

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I wanted to touch a little bit more, and kind of show you from a Prognosis perspective, how we can maintain, and how we can view some, some usage and adoption reporting and some asset management features that we have inside of Prognosis. So I'm going to show you that here.

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So everybody should be able to see my screen there. This is Prognosis. This is what you're going to see when you install Prognosis. There are live dashboards, live reports that are all created in HTML5. So if you wanted to log in and view this on like an iPad, or your Android device, there's no Java required. Everything is configured in HTML5. And specifically, to what Jon was bringing up there, how can we report and how can we talk about this usage and adoption? And we've seen from our audience, too, what we wanted to see was some improving telemedicine performance -- and I believe part of that is improving telemedicine adoption. And this is one way we can show this adoption. 

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And just for this dashboard right here, we're able to see that we're breaking this down by detailed utilization by product, and specifically, phone model, or could be video model, right? And as I click on this, these products drop-down list, we're able to see all the different types of, in this particular case that happens to be Cisco, the Cisco devices and Cisco endpoints that we have registered inside of our inside of a call manager or maybe our CMS. 

For instance, we wanted to see, okay, “What's going on in all of our telepresence devices?” And we can change our periods to say today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, we can customize this period frame. And where do we want to pull this information from? In this case, we're doing it from this one particular cluster. And then we click ‘Go’ and it's going to go out there. And it's going to pull in the top 20 utilization by product by phone model. 

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So we're actually seeing the product name, right. So we're actually seeing that this is a Telepresence DX80, and this is an EX60. Right, our total calls, and the total duration of those calls. And this particular column is showing our Top 20 by Utilization, but we could break this down all the way to Top 200 Devices so we could see every single device has access across our network and our utilization. And we're showing poor utilization or no utilization and maybe we have some different telemedicine rooms set up that just aren’t being used for whatever reason, maybe it's their location. We could actually move the device out of that room and maybe place it in a different room and see if our adoption increases. 

A great little detailed utilization report that we can we can break down specifically by device, right all the way down to the model level, we will report them.

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And then I also like to show you how we can show what phones have been registered. So Jon mentioned and Tim alluded to also, that maybe sometimes our patients’ hands might become a little bit sticky there. So what we can do is we can actually break this down into showing out, and this was kind of a high-level pie graph here, that shows all our phones that are registered and what are not registered. All these items that were that we're looking at here, to be 100% customized to your environment. And we're going to alert and alarm on any part, at any criteria that you wish are particular to your environment. 

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So for instance, we're as we break this down a little bit farther, we can see Phone Status by Device Pool. Here is our whole Device Pool and here's the percent that's registered out of the total number of phones. And we could say, you know, maybe if we have a device pool for ER, and say if the ER phones are 20% registered or 10% registered, we want to be able to alert an alarm saying, “Hey, look, something's going on in this area.” Or if we have a certain wing or certain patient wing, we can do that as well.

We also break that down by model. So here’s a kind of high level pie graph, now we can also click on sold by model. And when we click on the Phone by Model, we're able to see all the phones that we have out there, and our telepresence devices. 

And we can click on that particular model. For instance, I've highlighted the (Cisco) 9971 and we can see the Phones with Model Selected, and we're going to throw our top thousand lists here on this one page, and here are all of the devices. Right away, we're noticing, hey, these are not registered, right? So then we're able to click on each one of these phones and drill down into it and say, okay, “What's causing this massive register?” “When was the last time this was registered?” And from this screen right here, we can even send this display, we can show our location and the end-user. So this allows us to start a troubleshooting process, right? And we can even export this out to Excel. So if we wanted to put this on an Excel spreadsheet, email it out or print it out, and physically walk around the hospital, touch these phones and try to find these phones. We could do that.

So just a couple brief way there that we can help with the telemedicine performance by adoption. And where we can also increase our utilization reporting and alerting and alarming on those devices.

So if you guys have any other questions, or if you'd like to reach out afterwards, I'd be happy to schedule like a one on one where we can, you know, show some more detailed prognosis in your environment. Thank you so much.

Tim Poindexter: Thanks, Josh. Appreciate the walkthrough on that.

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Well, that about wraps up the webinar that we have for you today. If you'd like to connect with us, there are a few places that we're very active online, of course:

As I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar, we do have a dedicated healthcare UC monitoring page with a number of resources on it. The full URL is listed on the slide and it's also available in the “Attachments and Links” section below the webinar viewing screen. If you'd like to schedule a meeting, you can go to that page. You can also reach out to one of our colleagues, Pierce Miller.

Finally, we'd love to have you rate this webinar provide any feedback you might have to help us improve. Jon, before we say goodbye, do you have any last thoughts or final comments to make?

Jon Kremkau: No, I just wanted to thank everybody for their time. Again, we've seen the segment grow tremendously. And with having the different acquisitions as we spoke about them, and how people are really trying to look at all these different environments and figure out how they can easily monitor and manage all these different platforms. Prognosis is a fantastic fit. So to Josh's point, we're happy to set up some time to go one on one, talk about your environment, your goals or challenges. And we look forward to working with you moving forward.

Tim Poindexter: Thanks, Jon. Well, on behalf of all of us here at IR, we appreciate your time. We hope this was valuable to you. And we're happy to speak with you more if there's any way that we can be of service. Thank you so much for joining us and hope you have a great day.

IR | BrightTALK

Topics: Webinar Communications Health and Medicine Cisco Avaya Featured Webinars Healthcare Technology Collaborate

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