Background
The Iowa Veterans Home offers two levels of care – residential and nursing – for more than 560 veterans and their spouses. This care is provided by approximately 965 employees. Of the 153 state-owned facilities for veterans in the United States, the Iowa Veterans Home is one of the largest. Its campus spans nearly 150 acres, with six main nursing care buildings and one residential care building.
Customer Needs
Iowa Veterans Home’s relationship with CEC spans more than 30 years and began with nurse call and overhead paging systems. The partnership grew to include security projects, such as surveillance and access control systems. Today, CEC helps Iowa Veterans Home manage many of these technology systems, plus phone systems and Voice over WiFi handsets.
Solution
Iowa Veterans Home’s IT Bureau Chief attended CEC’s annual Business Technology Conference and learned about technology that would make life easier for nurses and better for veterans.
After partnering with CEC to complete several technology projects, Iowa Veterans Home now has:
- A phone system allowing groups of numbers to be configured to receive and process incoming calls in a certain order.
- Voice over WiFi handsets that integrate with the new 950-user phone system and support deployment of voice over the network without degrading existing 802.11n network capacity performance.
- A reduced number of emergency calls made to IT staff in the middle of the night about system problems that need to be addressed ASAP.
- Ongoing technical support for all of its technology systems, from security solutions to phone systems.
We have a really good partnership with CEC. The quality of work we receive is great, which is why we continue to renew our support contract every year.
