Improving communication with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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This morning on the way to the office, I was listening to NPR, and heard an interesting story about a hospital in North Carolina which is rated as one of the worst hospitals in the US. This less than desirable honor was not given to the hospital by the state or by a medical council, but by the medicare 5-star quality rating program.

The story was interesting, it detailed all the efforts the hospital had gone through to try to improve their score, thereby improving their reimbursement rate. They were having limited success. One of the metrics in which the hospital was still getting low marks, was communication.

So if you have responsibility for communications in a hospital or a healthcare call center, what are you doing to improve your communication with the deaf and hard of hearing? Have you even considered that if you improved your communication with this important demographic, that your reimbursement rates could go up?

NexTalk is a deaf communication software company, founded in 1990 by three engineers, one of which was deaf. The goal of the company was to provide a better interface and overall experience for the deaf community. NexTalk's SimpliciTTY TTY call management software is used in numerous health-centric call centers and offices, as well as in hospitals and clinics all throughout the United States and Canada. NexTalk SimpliciTTY provides a software based solution that allows your staff or call center agents to receive and place TTY calls from the deaf and hard of hearing, without using outdated analog TTY Phones. TTY calls are received by employees/agents on their computers and the call information is captured and tracked by your existing call center equipment. SimpliciTTY is call center equipment agnostic and will work with virtually any existing phone system, be it Cisco, avaya, Shoretel, Panasonic, or any other PBX or Key System Unit. The System is available in both onsite (hard server and virtual server) and hosted configurations.

Improving your medicare 5-star quality rating is not the only benefit of using NexTalk's SimpliciTTY software. SimpliciTTY allows you to eliminate the need for relay services (text or video). With all the recent hacks and data breaches, there is much to be said for limiting your exposure and liability by reducing and controlling who has access to you customers, their personal information and their healthcare information. This is one of the reason that 3 of the nations top 10 banks use SimpliciTTY by NexTalk.
 
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