davehaertel wrote on Wednesday, June 10, 2009:
WOW, I’m glad that this topic was so interesting to many folks.
To address the cost savings issues for medical offices, a traditional 3com nbx or NEC pbx for around 20 extensions, out the door is about 20,000 US dollars. Trixbox CE is the Asterisk distro that I’m currently using, costs nothing, with unlimited extensions, has all the features and more of the above mentioned phone systems and including the phones and hardware could do the same for about 1/3 less than the above mentioned systems. Also throw in scalability by the easy ability to link the systems and it quickly can save money. Right now I have the below listed setup and it saved the medical office about 50,000 or so if they would have gone with the commercial PBX systems:
4 locations, (location A, B, C, D)
A 100 series extensions
B 200 series extensions
C 300 series extensions
D 400 series extensions
A, B and C are all conntected through an MPLS T1 PRI (digital Link LAN’s between the 3 major offices)
we linked D into all the systems through an IAX trunk
So, now all 4 locations can transfer calls to each of the other offices as an internal call (this would definitely save money if your locations were separated by long distance charged areas)
In order for the commercial ones to work the same way, they would have had to buy a separate 20,000 dollar system for each office.
Some of the other nice features of Trixbox over the commercial stuff is that you can run it on PC hardware, these systems are installed on Dell Optiplex 360’s which when purchased with Freedos, cost us about 600 dollars per unit. This particular box with 4 gigs of decent RAM and the add on cards can handle up to 24 voice lines in a PRI, so it’s very scalable. This could even have been set up as the main location having one server and the other servers using the main one as a VOIP server of it’s own, but 1.5 Meg T1’s are just not enough bandwidth for that kind of setup, so this was a better solution with the existing overhead. These systems handle 10 to 15 extensions in each office and handle it VERY WELL. So, in essence a basic system, 600 dollars for the box, 850 for the add on phone card, either digital or analog and the IP phones that connect via SIP to the server, plus the installation and training costs. Much more of a cost savings than the commercial side. The reason Open EMR is not an option with them is because they are a new customer and are using Futura already and are not interested in making the change over. But for future offices, I think this is a great solution if we can get the plugin to work.
Ok, on to the plug in, there’s already a plugin written that is very well done to integrate Sugar CRM with Trixbox, so I’m thinking that the coding of it might not be all that different, both Open EMR and the CRM are running on LAMP stacks so dependencies are probably not that different, the asterisk call manager at the core of the trixbox can be manually coded to allow connections for scripts outside of the phone system, so I think this may be pretty straight forward. The client for that plugin is very small but seems to be very effective. I think the hardest part would be the server side in Open EMR to allow the script to make calls to the database which may not even be all that hard.
I definitely agree that it should be username and password based, so that it’s limited to the receptionist(s) who are handling the bulk of the calls. Sorry I’ve been out of touch, I wasn’t aware this was getting this much action.
Dave