BREVARD HISTORY: From ‘Cord Boards’ to Cloud Services, Health First’s Walter Aucoin Has Heard It All

Walter Aucoin began working at Holmes Regional Medical Center in 1983

Health First’s senior telephony engineer has seen a lot of changes in 40 years at work. Telephone expert says even in an era of patient portals, the health system may handle as many as 1 million voice calls a month.

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – When Walter Aucoin began working at Holmes Regional Medical Center in 1983, the hospital’s telephone system had just undergone a major upgrade. Before this, calls came into an old-time switchboard, a “cord board.”

To transfer a call to the right department, an operator plucked the line she was speaking into out of one socket and plugged it into another. Then, in the early 1980s, the hospital purchased an electronic switchboard.

Technology has changed immensely, says the longtime Health First System Engineer. And so have humans. People are just as likely to make an appointment or get a Provider’s feedback without ever speaking aloud.

That’s bittersweet for Aucoin (pron. OAK-win), who was born in New Orleans and grew up in nearby Arabi, loving telephones and radio. A slightly older neighbor got hired by South Central Bell and taught him “to wire.” He used it to build radio equipment.

To this day, Aucoin is an avid amateur radio operator and organizer of demonstrations and competitions. (Last month, as the President of the Platinum Coast Amateur Radio Society, he organized a field day at the Melbourne Fire Training Center.)

He imagined he’d hire on at Bell and live out his days in telephones, but a chance meeting at a wedding in New Orleans sent him on a different course. He met a girl, Cynthia Hemel. She was in nursing school, and her family lived here on the Space Coast. After college, she got a job at Holmes Regional, and shortly, so did her new husband.

Walter Aucoin began in the biomedical laboratory but was soon recruited by Management Information Systems and tasked with maintaining the new telephony system the hospital had purchased – the ROLM CBX. It was the dawn of the digital age, and Aucoin was all-in – but he still practiced his first love, amateur radio.

In 1993, the two converged. During a major system overhaul at the hospital, the telephone system was scheduled to go down for several hours.

Aucoin marshaled the ham radio community – 31 operators in total – to set up around the hospital and act as primary communicators during the telephone outage. A hospital newsletter from the time, the “Heartbeat,” captured the moment in a photo and news brief headlined, “Amateur radio society lends helping ‘hams’.”

“People hear about ham radio clubs and our field days, our friendly competitions, and they may forget, the real aim is being ready in an emergency. When nothing else is up, amateur radios will be used for emergency communications, and ham operators will come out in force.”

In 1995, Health First formed. Aucoin had by then been a Telecommunications Specialist (Senior), Network Engineer and Systems Engineer. He was responsible for bringing whole hospitals online with advanced digital telecommunications. Digital technology offered end users the benefit of “caller ID.”

Increasingly, phone calls became “handsfree” with the use of headsets. After the turn of the century, technology shifted again to voice-over-IP (VoIP), which has enabled integration of voice services and data. About the time The Heart Center was built, in the mid-2000s, Health First onboarded Cisco Systems to do just that.

In his 40 years, Aucoin has seen clinicians go from carried clipboards and handwritten patient charts, to digital files, to patient portals and strict privacy safeguards. Today, clinicians work not only on mobile computers but enjoy voice communication devices that clip to their shirts and weigh less than a car key.

Aucoin says there was a time when telephones were “just telephones – there was nothing more they could do than connect with another person,” and that much has been gained since then, and, perhaps, a little has been lost.

But even in an era of online scheduling, emails and text messages, the health system may handle as many as 1 million voice calls a month. (A manager of Health First’s Enterprise Call Center says her team alone handles 75,000.)

Walter and Cynthia Aucoin were married more than 30 years, had two children and two grandchildren. She died in 2014 from complications arising from multiple myeloma.

Today, the 66-year-old is a few months away from being eligible for a full retirement. He says he looks forward to traveling and spending time with his family.

Visit HF.org/news to keep up with the latest at Health First.

Similar Stories