With all the talk about “health care” you would expect growing demand for more application integration for this particular industry vertical! The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center can process “dial lists” that enable the system to make outbound phone calls. The “dial list” typically gets a list of phone numbers from a MySQL database that can be populated by some other application, like scheduling software. It would not be out of the realm of possibility for the ShoreTel ECC to be used to confirm appointments or to generate a broadcast message that could be confirmed by a script that captures DTMF responses, including the ability to talk to a live person!
The ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center, though primarily and inbound call processing solution, can be applied to do outbound campaign dialing. In addition to the native SQL scripting tools, the system can integrate with a wide variety of applications through either OBDC, XML or “triggers” and we have had experience with each of these options. There is a young man up in the bay area, Houston Neal, who has been writing a bit about Health Care Applications and you might take a minute to check out his recent article on this subject: Seven Great Applications for PBX systems in Medial Practice.