Highlights:
- Saving money: With RingCentral deployed at all of its 150+ clinical locations, Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery has reduced its telecom expenses by more than 40%.
- Scaling seamlessly: Because RingCentral is so easy to implement, the company can roll out telephony for new locations more quickly and easily than ever.
- Improving operations: Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery uses RingCentral’s built-in digital faxing, intuitive IVRs, and reporting dashboard to improve workflows and the patient experience.
Where many of America’s leading dermatologists practice
For individuals suffering from conditions relating to their skin, hair, or nails—from aesthetic concerns to skin cancer—Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery has been there to help for more than 40 years.
Today, Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery is one of the largest premier dermatology practices in the United States—with hundreds of Board-Certified Dermatologists, Cosmetic Surgeons, and other medical specialists caring for patients at more than 150 clinical facilities throughout the country. And in 2022, a Newsweek national ranking placed several of Advanced Dermatology’s doctors on its “America’s Best Medical Dermatologists” list.
America’s premier dermatology practice uses RingCentral to improve its call-answer rate significantly
A telephony system in need of more than cosmetic changes
Brett Mcvay, Network Administrator for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, notes that before switching to RingCentral soon after the lockdowns went into effect, the company had been using an outdated phone system administered by a Managed Service Provider (MSP). That arrangement left Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery with considerable operational challenges.
“The MSP took weeks to fulfill requests for the smallest changes to our phone menus,” Brett says. “And as for updating our call queues or hunt groups, that often wouldn’t happen at all, no matter how long we waited.”
Brett adds that the feature-poor phone system led to serious business challenges, including “frequent outages, analogue fax headaches, and lack of platform flexibility needed from a phone system during a situation like COVID presented us.”
Experiencing the benefits of RingCentral from day one
Brett, along with his team of two, began migrating the first few ADCS clinics to RingCentral in 2019 and into the early days of the lockdowns —and they quickly saw how the new cloud communications solution would improve the company’s operations.
“COVID was our first test for RingCentral. We had to temporarily close select clinics with almost no notice. But thanks to RingCentral, we were able to do it all ourselves. We set up users with RingCentral softphones on their computers, so they could stay in touch with patients. We updated our phone menus and added emergency messages on our clinics’ numbers, and were up and running remotely—all in a week. RingCentral passed that test with flying colors.”
Unleashing one workflow improvement after another with RingCentral
Brett adds that since rolling out RingCentral across all 150+ of the company’s locations, Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery has found numerous ways to leverage the communications solution to improve operations.
For example, a major source of new patients and revenue for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery are patient referrals from primary care practices—most of which come in via fax. Prior to RingCentral, Advanced Dermatology received those referrals on desktop fax machines, which were reliant on POTS lines and unstable ATA’s. Worse, with the lockdowns, there was typically no one in these offices when the faxes came in.
“When we switched to RingCentral,” explains Brett, “suddenly we had the ability to receive those faxes remotely, basically like an inbound email, and respond quickly. That improved patient care and our revenue streams.”
RingCentral’s ease of management, Brett adds, is also helping Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery improve its clinical workflows and create an even better patient experience.
“Say a clinic calls and asks us to update their phone greeting because a couple of their providers will be away for a week. With our MSP handling our previous phone system, that change request could’ve taken weeks—at which point the change would be irrelevant. But RingCentral’s admin portal is so easy that I can go in myself, from anywhere, and in about 20 minutes make whatever changes the clinic wants.”
But the most significant advantage RingCentral has brought to Advanced Dermatology, Brett adds, is the one he and his team experienced the first time they migrated a clinic over to their new RingCentral environment—the ability to spin up a new location quickly and easily. This is particularly valuable to the company as Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery continues to expand.
“The easy scalability is probably the most valuable aspect of RingCentral for us. Integrating acquired medical practices into our telephony environment was difficult with our old provider. But with RingCentral, we can go into a newly acquired practice, onboard them onto RingCentral over a weekend, and have them up and running in our system on Monday morning.”
Lowering costs
Finally, Brett points out that moving to RingCentral has also helped Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery cut its telephony costs significantly.
“Now when we spin up a new site, our only costs are adding new users to the environment. We don’t need anyone to install anything. And because RingCentral is device-agnostic, we can continue using whatever desk phones and conference phones the practice already has. Over time, that’s creating massive cost-savings.”
“You’d expect such an upgrade in capabilities to create additional costs—because now you’re getting ease-of-use, mobility, scalability, digital faxing, and an all-in-one telephony environment we can easily manage ourselves. But switching to RingCentral is actually saving Advanced Dermatology a significant amount of operational expense.”
Originally published Dec 15, 2022