Inphonite is sponsoring two AzMGMA events in Tucson.  Please stop by and introduce yourself.

May 12, 2009      12:00am
Arizona Inn, 2200 E. Elm Street, Tucson, AZ 85719

Tucson Central Monthly Meeting
“Red Flag” Overview
Carl Shultz and Diana Knight, Card Solutions, Inc.
http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=122

May 19, 2009      7:30am
Amber Lights Retirement Community, 6231 N Montebella Rd, Tucson, AZ 85704

Tucson North/Northwest Monthly Meeting
“Better Manage Your Retirement Plan with Education & Fiduciary Compliance”
Beth Bank, an advisor with the Stuchen / Levy Group of Merrill Lynch http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=123

You can register for each event from the links above.  For non-AzMGMA members the cost is $35.

The original idea behind InphoniteVoice was to be a simple subscription model. For example, a person would sign up for a subscription that would have a monthly fee of N dollars a month. That would give the subscriber some number of messages they could send per month. Seems simple enough - but what would happen if the subscriber exceeded their monthly allotment of messages? Alright, then we will just charge a small overage fee per message after they used up their allotment. Not too bad so far but then we added the capability to transfer calls. Now calls could easily become very long and we're paying long distance for two outbound legs. So then we added the concept of minutes for calls that lasted more then 3 minutes would cost an additional 4.9 cents/minute. So what started as an ultimately simple idea got really complicated really fast. A monthly bill would need to be broken out into bucket messages, additional messages, and extra minutes. The system would change 5 different monthly subscription rates with different bucket messages for each level. Each level also had different overage costs. Wow, it got complicated.

The new model is significantly more simple - credits. One credit equals 1 message - delivered. If a message exceeds 3 minutes in length an additional credit will be used. The credits never expire. Credits get cheaper as you buy more of them at once. You don't get charged for credits you don't use, as is the case with the subscription model. Why are credits 3 minutes? Why not change less per credit and then lower a credit to 1 minute? A credit includes the overhead of contacting a person. For example, in InphoniteVoice, if you created a rule that tries multiple numbers and if that person is not contacted until the 3rd number that's still only 1 credit. The 3 minute "clock" does not start until you reached your intended recipient. Our estimates is that you will be able to deliver nearly all of your notifications using a single credit per individual reached. The only time you may need to use multiple credits is when you are utilizing transfer functionality.

There are a few more advantages to using credits. It is now fairly easy to add coupons. In fact - here's a free coupon for you to try: FREE100. The first 50 to use the coupon will get 100 free additional credits. Also, every account has the ability to refer other people. If you refer someone then every time they buy credits you will get 10% of their purchase automatically credited to your account as credits.

The new model is now live so go ahead and give it a try. Don't forget to use your coupon!

Ever thought about what you can do to keep your computer running well? I'm sure we all have, and pretty often. There are a few things you can do regularly to make sure that the computer you run ReminderPro on is as healthy as can be. Here are my ideas:

Restart the computer often. While a computer is running programs, information gets stuffed away in memory. This is information that the computer needs temporarily to do its thing, and the space taken by this stuff is usually made available after the job is done. Nonetheless, programs like ReminderPro can stuff away quite a bit of this information. To clear this stuff out, we recommend that you restart the computer weekly, at least.

Defragment the hard drive. I won't go into all the technical stuff required to fully explain this, but let me just say that defragmenting your computer's hard drive can make a big difference in how the computer runs. It could be faster and more reliable if you defragment regularly, perhaps monthly. Certainly, it'll help avoid problems with ReminderPro. That said, you would defragment your hard drive by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and clicking on Disk Defragmentor.

Clear out temporary files. Personally, I've found that some frustrating things can happen if there is a "bad" temporary file on your computer. This can happen if a program you're working in locks up, or if a power surge restarts your computer for you. So if you have a situation when using your computer, you might wish to restart and then delete temporary files, just to try to keep things running smoothly. (Frankly, its a good practice to do this monthly, anyway.) Now, there are a few ways to delete temporary files, but the easiest is to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Disk Cleanup. You would run it against your C: drive (it'll prompt you). After it has scanned your computer, it will pop up a list of things you can "cleanup". The only one that needs to be checked off is Temporary Files. That said, it is a good idea to empty the Recycle Bin occasionally, and maybe do other things from time to time — especially if you need more room on your hard drive. But that is optional for our purposes here, so I'll leave that up to you.

Are there other things you do to keep your computer running? Please share them here.

Save the date.  The MGMA 2009 Exhibit Hall will be open October 11 - 13.

Be sure to stop by to see a demonstration of our newest hosted IVR solution - InphoniteVoice.

MGMA 2009 Annual Conference
Colorado Convention Center
Denver, CO
October 11–13, 2009
Booth: 1832

See you there!

I am pleased to announce the new Inphonite Wiki. The wiki will immediately replace our old knowledge base for ReminderPro and LabRetriever. It will also house the online documentation for InphoniteVoice as it becomes available. You can check out the wiki by going to wiki.inphonite.com.

An interesting feature that one of our customers asked me if our product, InphoniteVoice, can do is what I'm calling 'Click-to-Conference.' Essentially it would be the same as one of those myriad of inbound conference calls services where you dial a phone number and then a PIN. Click-to-Conference would allow you to have a widget on your web site and then, with the click of a button, dial your phone number and automatically transfer your call to the conference call. After the customer asked me this I thought about it and within 15 minutes or so built a working prototype. While it's cool is there a market? Would you buy this service? If so why, and how much would you be willing to pay?

Our Support Department has had some inquiries from users recently about decreasing the delay between a live person answering the phone and the start of the message playing to them. There are setting changes you can make, so I thought I would share.

Before I go through this, I want to point out that the setting is changed differently depending upon the version of ReminderPro being used. If you're not sure what version you are running, launch ReminderPro and go to Help > About and the version will be shown at the top.

That said, if you are using ReminderPro version 2 or 2008, you would adjust the Live Answer Handling option, located in the Setup screen, under the Other/Advanced tab. Due to the sensitivity of some of the options on that tab, you must press CTRL+F10 to view the options on that page. Also, please be aware that the setting is in milliseconds; our recommendation is to set it to 700.

Now, if you're using ReminderPro DX with a Pika telephony card, you would go to the same tab and press CTRL+F10, but you would then click the Voice Board Settings (Advanced) button. Look for the Speech End Time field, and set that to a value between 500 and 3000. Again, this is in milliseconds. So if you want the message to begin immediately after answer, set it to 500.

Finally, a note of caution. It is important to make sure you know what you're doing when you start changing settings like this. So if you have questions about these settings or something else you stumble upon, please be sure to contact our Support Department for clarification before making any adjustments.

Was this helpful? Is this something you've been wondering about? Let me know what you think.

TMCnet's Anuradha Shukla discusses a new report from Research and Markets that identifies "outbound IVR as a sector that will experience tremendous growth over the next five years."  It also mentions hosted outbound IVR, speech recognition and integration with email and SMS.  Here's the link:

Outbound Applications Rise Despite Economy

In the same article, Shukla also refers to a recent report from Forrester Research report entitled, "Proactive Outbound Notification Saves Money".  It covers the growth in outbound communications and consumer communications preferences such as mobile devices.

Happy reading!

I am please to announce the Inphonite forums. These forums will allow users of our products to post questions and get answers from the community and the Inphonite staff. For InphoniteVoice users this will be the primary mechanism of support. The InphoniteVoice forums will be actively monitored by our support engineers and development staff. As for ReminderPro, the primary mechanism to get support is to email us at support@inphonite.com or to call us at 1-888-367-5859. The ReminderPro forums are monitored occasionally by Inphonite support engineers. The forums are set up with the following categories:

• InphoniteVoice Discussons
• InphoniteVoice Announcements
• InphoniteVoice Questions
• Import Questions
• InphoniteVoice API/Web Services Questions
• ReminderPro Discussions
• ReminderPro Announcements
• ReminderPro 2008 Questions
• ReminderPro 2008 DX Questions
• ReminderPro 2.x and Older Questions
• Import Questions
• Other Products
• LabRetriever Questions

If you have any questions or comments about the new forums please don't hesitate to let us know!

The beta version of InphoniteVoice is now available for test.

InphoniteVoice makes it easy to create and send personalized messages. You can send one message or thousands. Sample message types include appointment reminders, emergency notifications, and automated phone surveys. InphoniteVoice supports phone, email and text messages. You can even use InphoniteVoice to enable your web site or CRM to support Click to Call. Since InphoniteVoice is a SaaS (Software as a Service), there is no additional hardware or software for you to install.

We invite you to test drive InphoniteVoice and then let us know your thoughts. To sign up, go to voice.inphonite.net. You can create an account and send up to 500 messages at no additional cost.

For additional information, browse http://www.inphonite.com

If you would prefer to see an online demonstration first, just click on my name above.

Ever have a situation when, after you've imported your patient information for a calling session, you need to change the message a patient receives? Maybe you need to change the provider a patient will be seeing, and want to send a message that reflects the new provider's name. Or perhaps the appointment is untimed, and you don't want the message to specify a time (which typical messages do). Or maybe its a surgical appointment and you want to send out a special message to them. Whatever the reason, there is an easy and quick way to change the messages your appointments will be receiving. We call it QuickEdit.

To use QuickEdit, go to Schedule > Quick Edit on the Reminder Pro menu. The first thing you do is choose a date or date range of appointments to look at. Clicking OK brings up a list of all appointments on the calendar for the date(s) in question. You can then use the Message to Assign dropdown to choose the message, and the Change Message button to assign it to the selected patient. This changes the message assigned to that patient, but leaves all appointment information intact. Handy, don’t you think?

Have you ever used QuickEdit? What are some situations a tool like this might be useful for? Please comment on this post with your thoughts.

Over the past several months I have tried and tested many Internet Telephony Solution Providers (ITSPs). Some of them were great, others were, well, less then stellar. Over the course of my testing I devised a set of criteria that allows me to quickly determine if I will consider an ITSP.

• Low number of hops - less then 15 hops is ideal.
• Low latency - less then 100ms is ideal for jitter free VoIP calls.
• Multiple service location end points.
• If one data center is down you can reroute your calls to another location.
• Allows you to select the closet location with the fewest number of hops and the lowest latency.
  
• No monthly fees and low per minute fees.
• Maximum of 2 cents per minute. Discounts for volume are a good thing.
  
• Let's face it, there is no such thing as an "Unlimited" plan. Either you'll save money by just paying 1.2 cents per minute or the ITSP will cancel your account for excessive usage.
• Minimum of 10 concurrent call sessions (outbound). More capacity can be requested as volume grows.
• Supports inbound numbers for a low monthly fee.
• Per call outbound Caller ID - This is required for our Telephony SaaS application - InphoniteVoice.
• G729a support - Needed to compress calls without significant loss of quality.

Here's my short list of ISTPs that meet those requirements:

• Gafachi - (www.gafachi.com)
• Voip.ms - (www.voip.ms)
• Teliax - (www.teliax.com)
  

If you know of any other ITSPs that meet these requirements please let me know!

Having had significant experience with using a hosted PBX and now an on premise PBX, I will relay my experiences here. First and foremost, whatever you decide to do research your chosen service provider(s) before choosing them.

Hosted PBX

A hosted PBX is a PBX that is hosted by the VoIP provider. Typically you would connect your phones directly to the VoIP provider’s service via your public internet connection.  Some providers also offer an internet termination option that gives you a T1 or similar internet connection that is terminated directly into their data center, avoiding the public internet altogether.

Advantages of Hosted PBX

• No investment in a PBX is necessary.
• Relatively ease and quick to implement.
• If the internet connection is down the provider can be configured to route calls to cell phones or other backup lines.
• Multiple internet connections can be used to provide connection redundancy.
• No need to upgrade the PBX as this is automatic when the VoIP provider upgrades there systems.
  

Disadvantages of Hosted PBX

• If your VoIP provider is down your phones are down.
• If the VoIP provider has exceeded their maximum number of concurrent call sessions you will not be able to make an outbound call.
  
• Usually higher ongoing fees. Cost is usually priced per extension which can often be expensive for low volume users.
• Locked into the limits of the hosted PBX. If a custom feature or experience is require this can be expensive or impossible to add.
• Services like InphoniteVoice can be used to augment your Hosted PBX and provide custom, on demand solutions.
  
• Additional features usually add to the monthly fees.
• More difficult to switch between Hosted VoIP providers especially if your internet connection is provided from the VoIP company.
• Extension to extension calls routed over your internet connection unnecessarily using bandwidth.
  

On Premise PBX

An on premise PBX is a VoIP PBX that is located at your site (or your main office). This computer would be connected to the internet and route phone traffic to your Internet Telephony Solution Provider (ITSP) or your traditional trunks (Analog, Digital). Most VoIP PBXs can be configured to do both.

Advantages of On Premise PBX

• Multiple call routes can be created to provide redundant ITSPs.
• Multiple internet connections can be used to provide connection redundancy.
• Total control over the user experience. With the wide availability of tools on the market, companies with engineers can write custom applications to build a complete custom experience.
• Can interface with existing “legacy” phone connections for either primary or backup service.
• Easier to switch between ITSPs.
• Allows for integration with Unified Messaging platforms such as Exchange 2007.
• Usually lower ongoing fees.
• Extension to extension calls stay on your LAN or WAN.
  

Disadvantages of On Premise PBX

• Upfront costs. You will need to buy and maintain a server and PBX software.
• More difficult and time consuming to implement.
• Requires a more technically savvy staff to configure and maintain.
• If the PBX is down your phones are down.
• May need to pay for upgrades to the PBX. Downtime risk when upgrades are performed.

Choices

As you can see it’s not a simple answer whether to choose to go between a Hosted PBX or an On Premise PBX. I will recommend that if you go with a Hosted PBX choose a company that can offer you an internet connection that is terminated in their data center. Using the public internet, at least in my experience, may lead to call quality issues. For our company we used a hosted VoIP provider and were very disappointed. It took us 4 months of research but eventually we decided to switch to an on premise PBX with multiple ITSPs (three actually). This allows us to provide redundancy and elastic capacity. Whichever you decide make sure you do your research. Choosing a lemon is a costly mistake which can leave to less then desirable customer experience.

 

 

InphoniteVoice makes it easy to send reminder notifications via phone, email or text messaging.  Since it is a service (SaaS), InphoniteVoice is a great solution for small businesses.  Healthcare providers often use practice management or EMR software to generate the list of appointments that InphoniteVoice uses in making reminder calls.

But what about small business?  What small business scheduling software do you use? One recommendation was ServiceCEO by InsightDirect.  I am sure there are others as well.

As always, your input is greatly appreciated.  To provide feedback, simply click on the Comments link below this post.  Thanks!

While using Reminder Pro, you might find that the Manual Start Calls button on the toolbar may be disabled, or "ghosted". Of course, if this is the case, a call session cannot be manually generated or started. Needless to say, this can be a bit concerning until the cause is understood.

The key to this situation is the word manual. As you may know, Reminder Pro has the ability to import your patient information, and generate and start the call session automatically. So, if Reminder Pro is set to automate these functions, the Manual Start Calls button will be disabled.

To enable the Manual Start Calls button, you must disable to automatic feature. To do this, click Setup and uncheck the Autorun checkbox in the lower right.