A Better Way for Patients to Talk with their Doctors

De La Torre Orthotics and Prosthetics is a family business founded in 1962 to provide orthopedic braces and prosthetic limbs to the Pittsburgh area. Unique in the healthcare world, they often start their patient relationship in the hospital, and then continue lifelong partnerships through rehabilitation centers or their offices. Run by two brothers, the De La Torres are committed to providing the best service and products to their patients.

Ed De La Torre is the President of the company and has been running the company for 26 years.

There is one main lab where they create the custom orthotics and prosthetics and eight clinical offices where they work directly with the patients.

With 80 employees working together to treat over 30,000 patients per year throughout the metro area, communication is essential, and often critical.

Putting Patient Care First

Beyond the employees, patients, and different offices, De La Torre Orthotics and Prosthetics also works with doctor’s offices and over 20 hospitals in the Pittsburgh metro area daily.

The phones are always ringing, and since these calls relate to a person’s health and well-being, nothing can be missed.

Making The Switch

For 20 years the offices were using a traditional copper wire phone system.

In 2015 their communications management partner, Ronco Communications, informed them that the system would no longer be valid.

The technology was too old, and they would no longer be able to purchase any replacement parts if something went wrong. At this point, De La Torre began looking into more modern telecom options.

With their traditional system, they were not able to transfer calls, each office was completely separate, and after-hours forwarding was a complicated process. He wanted to find a new system that was flexible and could correct these issues.

De La Torre had heard about VoIP from friends and began working with a provider off a recommendation from a contact.

“We spent three months talking to them about the process, and everything we wanted to do was like walking through mud. Nothing was simple,” De La Torre explained. “I decided that the trouble was not worth it, and we canceled the process before it even really began. It just seemed inefficient, so I took a break from looking at VoIP.”

After several months, Ed decided to reach out to Ronco again to see if they had any suggestions for a VoIP provider. They quickly responded with the recommendation of Nextiva.

The Customer Service Difference

He decided to take the plunge and trust his IT team to start the process of transitioning. “I didn’t know anything about Nextiva other than what Ronco told me, which was that they were reliable and easy to work with.

It wasn’t until I started working with Nextiva directly to get set up that I was able to really see Nextiva shine. The customer service is unbelievable,” De La Torre explained.

“The experience with the Onboarding team has been nothing short of amazing. Our Implementation Manager has been phenomenal and willing to help us at every step of the journey.”

Meeting Clients’ Specific Needs

The practice replaced all their old phones, and while they found the Poly models to be intuitive, they needed some training on basic commands and using NextOS (Voice).

De La Torre and a few others in his office received an hour of training over a conference line from their Implementation Manager and felt prepared to run with the system.

He said, “We were then able to pass along our knowledge to the rest of the team. It was easy for everyone to adjust and catch on to the new system quickly.”

Time Saving Tools

Cloud communications opened up a lot of possibilities for features they previously only dreamed of. The flexibility and ease of call transferring was a massive win for the nine-location practice.

De La Torre expressed the improvements they saw right away. “When we had to tell patients and doctor’s offices to hang up and call a different number when they reached the wrong office, it was so frustrating for both them and us. Transferring now is so easy, and saves a ton of time!”

Money Saving Services

The offices are also really enjoying voicemail-to-email and call forwarding to their after-hours answering service.

“Everything used to be manual. We had to switch the calls over each night, emergency voicemails were going unheard… the simplification of the process has been a lifesaver.

Voicemails are received and forwarded to the correct contacts to be dealt with immediately. Call forwarding is no longer even thought about– we set it up on a schedule in NextOS (Voice), and it’s been working perfectly since then!”

During the adoption process, De La Torre called into Nextiva Support for any questions he had. “There were sometimes I would call three times a day. I just wanted to make sure I was doing everything right since communication is so important to us.

Every time I called, no matter who I talked to, they were pleasant and thorough. They were always willing to go the extra mile, check back in after our calls, and generally do anything they could!”

“Nextiva has really simplified our billing process and reduced our telecom costs!” De La Torre was also happy to announce.

“We had been getting nine book-sized telephone bills each month. Now, all our locations are consolidated into one bill, and we know it will be exactly the same each month. Nextiva saves us time and money!”