A year ago, Suwannee Valley Nursing Center and its chief, Danny Williamson, faced the most common of business turns — whether or not to expand. For years, the center in Jasper, Fla., had been a 60-bed facility on a lean piece of property with ordinary lines of communication to the outside world — analog telephone service, and modest data bandwidth on a DSL line.
Today, Williamson can look out and see the men at work, building new living spaces on a previously adjoining property that now belongs to Suwannee Valley Nursing Center. It’s a soulful wager, one that will raise the level of comfort and luxury for residents fortunate enough to call Suwannee Valley their home.
Accompanying the build, Suwannee Valley invested in a converged network solution, Dynamic IP from Kinetic Business by Windstream, with 100 Mbps (megabits per second) up-and-down speeds powering both Internet and VoIP (voice communication) services.
Suwannee Valley is a Medicare.gov five-star facility. Like others around the state, it files regular reports called “minimum data sets” on each patient in its care with the Agency for Health Care Administration. Along with the center’s own American Health Tech LTC medical files, the Internet is required to log histories — all are transmitted, updated and saved by a cloud service.
“We had a DSL, maybe 16 Mbps up or down. It was not ideal at all,” Williamson says. “We had issues with the Internet sometimes being down, or struggling when everyone was trying to do something at once.”
Suwannee Valley would have made the switch to this exponentially faster, more reliable solution earlier if Williamson had known that after a modest installation fee the monthly service charge would be comparable to what the facility used to pay for DSL. And Windstream techs had the new connection up in a day.
“They came out here and had stuff pre-done, and they pretty much swapped us over in one day.”
Williamson has gotten to know the techs over the years, even some who’ve moved on or retired, he says, and he likes them. It’s a shame he doesn’t see them anymore due to the reliability of the new solution.
“Of course, it’s only been six months or so, but we’ve not had any Internet downtime at all since we changed. We would occasionally with the DSL line,” Williamson said.
Likewise, the high-speed connection is just that, high speed, without any performance changes if health records are uploading or several people are making telephone calls.
When the new, 13,000-square-foot residence is finished, telephone handhelds will be purchased and powered by this Kinetic Business Dynamic IP connection like new data points on a spreadsheet. Similarly, residents now can carry their telephones and phone numbers with them when they change rooms.
“If there’s a room change, it’s pretty much just unplug the phone, take it with them, plug it into the new room, and keep the same number. There’s no issues, no problems.”
In time, the versatility of a plug-and-play telephone system may fade and be replaced by even newer, innovative technology. It’s hard to predict trends but easy to believe that the fiber network Suwannee Valley Nursing Center brought to its facility in 2018 will power the connection tomorrow’s new communications technology will require.
Learn more about Kinetic Business by Windstream’s network options at windstream.com/business.