Industries / Hospitals
Uniden Voice for Hospitals
Switch is the most important system in the building, and the least invested in.
A hospital telephone system is clinical infrastructure. Every misrouted call is a clinician interrupted, a family left frightened, or a transfer that took four attempts when it should have taken one.
24/7 by definitionGenuine Australian voicesKeep every numberWards, clinics and switch
Every shift change
Your switchboardFri 4:20pm
Operator mid transfer to a wardOne operator, one call, a queue behind it.Engaged
Family asking about a patientFrightened, and on hold.14s32s51s68sMissed
GP arranging an urgent referralClinically time critical.07s16s25s34sMissed
One transfer completed. One family distressed, one referral delayed.
The bit nobody counts
Misrouted calls are a clinical risk, not an inconvenience
Switchboard performance is rarely measured with the seriousness it deserves, and yet a delayed referral or an unreachable department has consequences no other business faces.
1Clinicians get interrupted by calls that were not for them. Every misroute costs a clinician's attention at the bedside, which is the most expensive interruption in the building.
2Families judge the whole hospital by switch. The first experience of your organisation is a hold queue. It sets the tone for everything that follows.
3Referrals have clinical deadlines. A GP who cannot reach the right registrar sends the patient somewhere else, or to an emergency department.
UNIDEN VOICE · MISROUTE LEDGER
Illustrative only. Put your own numbers in.
Inbound calls per week3,200
Reached the right place first time2,240
Misrouted or abandoned960
Share of those who were
clinically significantx 0.20
Calls that reached the wrong place192
Clinician time cost per misroute$28
LOST PER WEEK$5,376
LOST PER YEAR$279,552
Uniden Voice, per weeka fraction of that
Change the two highlighted lines to your own figures.
The arithmetic is the point, not our example.
The clinical risk carried by the referral delays is not costed here at all.
The arithmetic is the point, not our example.
The clinical risk carried by the referral delays is not costed here at all.
Six things every hospital says out loud
You have said at least four of these this month
These are not phone problems. They are patient flow and clinician time problems that arrive down a phone line.
01
Switch is a single point of failure
One or two operators carry the routing knowledge for the entire organisation. When they are on a call, everything queues behind them.
The agent handles routine routing and enquiries, so operators handle the calls that need judgement.
02
Most calls are visiting hours and directions
An enormous share of switchboard volume is hours, wards, parking, and where do I find the outpatient clinic.
Answered instantly by the agent, taking that volume off switch entirely.
03
Families need reassurance, not a queue
The most emotionally loaded calls you receive are the ones most likely to sit on hold.
Answered immediately, with a calm voice and a proper handover to the ward.
04
Rosters change who is contactable hourly
On call registrars, ward cover and shift changes mean the right destination for a call moves all day.
Time and roster based routing, so the flow follows the roster rather than a printed list.
05
Clinicians are never at a desk
Desk phones are the worst possible way to reach people who are on their feet all shift.
One identity that reaches them on a mobile handset anywhere in the building.
06
Nobody can audit what happened
When a referral went wrong, reconstructing who was called and when is close to impossible.
Every call recorded, transcribed and logged, so the trail exists.
Watch one of them get handled
2:05am. Switch has one operator. The call is answered instantly.
This is the call that used to sit in a hold queue. Here it is being answered by a Uniden Voice AI phone agent, in an Australian accent, from what you told it about your organisation.
It sounds like it is from here. Genuine Australian voices, not a call centre accent and not a robot reading a script.
It knows your organisation, not medicine. Wards, clinics, visiting hours, parking, and who covers what on which shift.
It never triages clinically. Anything symptomatic or urgent is escalated to a person or to emergency advice immediately.
It follows the roster. So an on call call reaches whoever is actually on call, not a list printed last month.
Uniden Voice AI Agent Live on line 100:38
AgentGood morning, you have reached Northbridge Hospital. How can I direct your call?
CallerMy mother was brought in this evening. I just want to know she is alright. She is on one of the medical wards.
AgentI understand, and I will get you to the right ward. Can you give me her full name and date of birth?
CallerJudith Alvarez, the twelfth of March 1948.
AgentThank you. She is on Ward 4B. I am putting you through to the nurses' station there now, and letting them know her daughter is calling.
CallerThank you so much.
AgentConnecting you now. If you are cut off, the direct number for 4B is in a text I have just sent you.
What happened at two in the morning
- Answered on the first ring instead of queueing behind switch
- Patient located and the call routed to the correct ward
- Context passed ahead so the nurse knew who was calling
- Direct ward number texted in case the call dropped
One number, an entire organisation behind it
A GP with an urgent referral should never wait behind a parking question
Publish one number. Behind it, general enquiries never touch switch, clinical calls are prioritised, and routing follows the roster rather than a printed list.
Live call being routedOverflow and after hours to the AI agent
Demand peaks
Winter does not negotiate with your switchboard roster
Hospital call volume tracks the respiratory season and every shift change in between. Demand rises for months at a time, and switchboard headcount cannot rise with it.
An AI agent gives switch elastic capacity. It answers every call immediately, removes the enormous volume of routine enquiries, and leaves your operators free for the calls that genuinely need a person.
Inbound calls across a hospital yearshape, not scale
What switchboard can realistically answer Overflow the AI agent picks up
Illustrative shape based on a typical Australian hospital year. Your own curve depends on your case mix.
It plugs into what you already run
Your phone should know which department is wanted
Uniden Voice connects to more than a thousand apps and offers open APIs, so routing can follow your rosters and directories rather than a laminated sheet at the switchboard.
SalesforceHubSpotXeroZohoMondaySlackGoogle Business ProfileGoogle DriveMicrosoft OneDriveOpen APIs for the rest
01 · ON THE RING
Screen pops before you say hello
The caller's name, their history and their open record appear on the handset or in the app as it rings, so the first thing out of your mouth is their name and not "who am I speaking with".
02 · DURING THE CALL
Click to call from anywhere
Ring a clinician straight from the record in your directory or rostering system, without ever typing a number. Fewer wrong numbers, and every call logged against the right file automatically.
03 · AFTER THE CALL
Notes that write themselves
Recording, transcript, AI summary and the next action land in your CRM or your shared drive. Nobody has to remember what was promised on a Friday afternoon.
Why Uniden, and not the other twelve
An Australian platform for infrastructure that cannot be offshore or offline
Hospital calls are among the most sensitive and most critical in the country. Very few platforms keep them onshore end to end, and almost none are backed by a brand Australians have known since 1966.
Onshore, end to end
Designed and built in Australia, hosted in Australian datacentres, and supported by Australians you can actually get on the phone. Your customer conversations do not leave the country.
An accent that lands
The AI answers in a genuine Australian voice. It matters, because a caller who thinks they have reached an offshore call centre hangs up before you get the chance to help them.
Onshore, and that matters here
Calls, recordings and transcripts stay in Australian datacentres, on an Australian owned platform, supported by Australians. Patient and family conversations never leave the country.
One provider, one bill
Keep your numbers including 1300 and 1800, and take the NBN connection from us too. Fewer vendors to chase when something goes wrong at the worst possible moment.
Straight answers
The questions hospitals ask us first
Will the AI ever triage a patient?
No. We configure it specifically not to. The agent handles wayfinding, visiting hours, department routing and general enquiries. It does not assess symptoms and it does not give clinical advice.
Anything that sounds clinical or urgent goes immediately to a person, and genuine emergencies are directed to call triple zero. Those boundaries are set by you and they do not drift.
Can routing follow our rosters?
Yes, and this is usually the biggest single improvement. Call flows can route by time of day, by day of week and by on call arrangement, so a call at 3am reaches whoever is actually covering rather than a number that was correct last month.
Where your rostering system can be reached through an integration or an API, that can drive routing directly.
How does this fit with our existing switchboard team?
It takes the volume they should never have been carrying. Visiting hours, parking, directions and simple department transfers get handled by the agent, which typically removes a very large share of total call volume.
Your operators keep the calls that need human judgement, and they stop being a bottleneck for everything else.
What happens when the AI cannot help?
It hands over, and you decide where. Anything clinical, any distressed caller, and any media enquiry can go straight through to a person, to a specific queue, or to a manager's mobile.
The caller is not asked to repeat themselves either. Whoever picks up gets the context the agent already gathered. Outside hours the agent takes the details, sends an SMS confirmation and queues the callback.
We run more than one campus. Does it handle that?
That is where it earns its keep. You advertise one number and we route behind it: by campus, by time of day, by queue, with overflow so a call at a flat out campus rings somewhere quieter instead of ringing out.
Each campus can keep its own greeting and its own direct number as well. Reporting rolls up across all of them, so you can finally compare how each one handles its phone.
Do I have to change my phone number?
No. Number portability is standard, including 1300 and 1800 numbers, so the number on every published ward, clinic and department number and on years of Google results stays exactly as it is.
We port it across and plan the cutover around your hours, not ours.
What happens if the internet drops?
Calls keep flowing. The mobile app keeps working over 4G and 5G, so your people can answer on their handsets while a site connection is down, and call flows can be set to divert to mobiles automatically.
You can also take your NBN service from Uniden Voice, so the connection and the phone system are one provider with one support number, instead of two companies each suggesting the problem belongs to the other.
How long does it take to get running?
A single site can be live quickly, because the apps need no hardware and the handsets arrive ready to plug in. The part worth doing properly is the call flow and the AI agent's knowledge of your business, and we build that with you rather than handing you a manual.
Number porting is the one step with an external timeline, so we usually run your new setup alongside the old line until the port completes. Switch is never unavailable during a changeover.
Now You're Talking
Make switch the strongest system in the building
Book fifteen minutes. Show us how calls reach your organisation today, and we will show you the version where routing follows the roster and families are answered on the first ring.
1300 881 662 · info@unidenvoice.com · www.unidenvoice.com