Phone outages planned during USA Health system upgrade
There will be three outages during the upgrade, affecting telecommunications in the hospitals and clinics the evening of Friday, April 14, and early Saturday, April 15.
USA Health’s telephone system will be upgraded this Saturday, April 15, at 2 a.m. There will be three outages during the upgrade process, affecting telecommunications in the hospitals and clinics. Kloud 7 phone services and outside call centers will not be affected.
The first outage will begin Friday, April 14, after 5 p.m. Telecommunications services will be taken offline for the Mitchell Cancer Institute, MCI – Fairhope, the Strada Patient Care Center, and UHOP until the upgrade at the hospitals is completed. After-hours call routing for these locations will function normally during this outage.
The second outage will take place at University Hospital and Children’s & Women’s Hospital on Saturday, April 15, soon after 2 a.m. Hospital operators will make an announcement that the facilities will lose phone services for up to 15 minutes while the phones are switched over to APEs (Emergency Call Processing Systems). Once moved over to the APEs, all phone services will be back online except for the following:
- Greetings via the call centers will not function; calls will go to a queue and ring through to be answered.
- Voicemail access will be unavailable at Children’s & Women’s Hospital.
- Five-digit calling between the hospitals will be unavailable until both systems are upgraded.
The third outage will take place after both hospitals have been moved over to the APEs, while their systems are being updated. This process will last up to two hours per facility. The hospitals will be updated independently of each other due to the volume of work involved:
- Children’s & Women’s Hospital will go down first. Operators will announce that the hospital will lose phone services. Phones will start coming back online as they are updated, but it could be up to 2 hours to complete the entire hospital.
- Once Children’s & Women’s Hospital is completed, operators will make an announcement that University Hospital will lose phone services during its update.
Once University Hospital's update is completed, the system will be tested to make sure everything is back online between the two hospitals. Then the clinics will be brought back online to complete the system upgrade. If any issues arise during the upgrade, the telecommunications team will have a Command Center line available at 251-341-4405. That line will be monitored the entire night and can be used during the hospital outages. They will be providing a list of numbers that will be active in critical areas of both hospitals during the outages, so operations can continue.
