MDabroad Takes the Call for International Travelers’ Medical Needs

Quality and cost of calls were becoming major challenges for MDabroad to effectively serve travelers’ and expatriates’ health care needs around the world. With Plivo’s Zentrunk SIP trunking solution, they solved both challenges and minimized latency at the same time.

Health insurance can be complicated, even at home. It’s exponentially more difficult to navigate the complexities of health coverage and services when you’re abroad.

That’s where MDabroad steps in. Whether you’re living in Brazil, vacationing in Central America, or traveling for business in Asia, the company solves the challenges of pricing, payment, and communications for insurance and medical services.

Phone calls are crucial for MDabroad’s international relationships with customers, providers, and insurers. On the one side, travelers expect to be connected promptly and receive a great customer experience, especially in the event of a medical emergency. On the other side, MDabroad is the face of the insurance companies, and it’s imperative that they abide by specific metrics and service level agreements.

Simply put, it’s a big deal for us to be able to connect.

MDabroad President and CEO Scott Rosen says, “There’s a lot of value to be added to calls, whether it’s entertainment or providing games and videos inside calls. But the first step is just to get people onto a unified calling platform, and that’s what we’re doing now.”

Quality, cost, and latency

MDabroad was facing telephony challenges with quality and cost when trying to help travelers and expatriates with their health care needs. In many cases, customers are in exotic locations where some phone carriers have good connections while others don’t.

“We found ourselves having to use several different carriers because the first issue was quality,” Rosen says. “Not everyone had great quality, so we would have to fill in the blanks with other carriers that were better in certain locations. This was getting to be very expensive. The other issue was rates. For example, we were using a company in Argentina for many destinations in Latin America because they were able to provide good connectivity in certain regions. It was an extremely expensive option, but we used it because it worked.”

MDabroad also tested the latency of the connection in Argentina, and that became another issue.

We had been searching for a good carrier for a while. To find minimum latency in Argentina, only a few carriers fit that bill, and Plivo was one of them.

When they discovered Plivo’s Zentrunk SIP trunking solution, MDabroad also solved for quality and cost.

Flexibility, security, and privacy

We chose Plivo as our carrier because we can terminate minutes where we want them at a good price and with very good quality and very low latency.

MDabroad also needed to route calls from a local number of a country to their call center in Buenos Aires, where all its operations are handled. For example, if a Brazilian customer travels to the US, he gets a US number that’s routed through a SIP trunk to MDabroad’s call center in Argentina. There are many different configurations and numbers, but all the calls end in the call center.

But more than just making that connection to the call center, MDabroad must strictly comply with HIPAA and GDPR regulations. It’s a core commitment for the company to quickly roll out solutions with a high-degree of security and privacy protections.

“To do this, we had to make several major changes in our network,” Rosen says. “Even the medical and insurance industries fail to understand the value of customer information protection and retention. That’s where Plivo is literally ahead of its time by securing data — and they’re one step ahead of the competition.”

Call transformation

For MDabroad, Plivo has completely transformed their calls for the better.

“We ask our team all of the time about the quality of the calls, and we don’t have any complaints from the users or our operators in the call center,” Rosen says.

We can look at our old call logs with the former carriers and see a lot of drops and repeat phone calls to the same places. We don’t see that now because the connections are solid.

And when it comes to cost, Rosen says, “I can say that our bill is a lot less.” By conquering the trifecta of less cost, high quality, and low latency, MDabroad demonstrates how a complex international business can achieve security, compliance, and a superior call experience no matter the location.