Dedicated to providing quality healthcare to all who need it, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas provides outpatient services, inpatient services, high-definition imaging, and 24/7 emergency medical care.

A person explaining procedure to patient

Founded:

1949
Based in:

Beaumont, TX
Employees:

2,000

Summary

Challenges

Reduce the risk of delays to front-line patient services by improving the availability of fax services.
Avoid rising costs for fax lines as telcos phase out analog services.

Solution

Selected a hybrid fax solution to boost cost-efficiency.
Harnessed managed services to help ensure high availability.
Moved analog fax lines smoothly to the cloud.

Results

Boosted availability and saved $200k a year
Increased clinical efficiency by 20%
Facilitated business expansion

Challenges

Downtime for fax services risked delays to front-line care services
Hardline connections made troubleshooting fax issues a time-consuming task
Costs of fax lines set to rise sharply as telcos phase out analog services

For over 70 years, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas (BHSET) has provided high-quality healthcare services. The organization’s physicians, nurses, and staff are constantly striving to offer newer and better programs, services, and technologies to the Southeast Texas community.

In recent years, BHSET has grown its in- and out-patient services significantly through the acquisition of local clinics and the construction of brand-new care facilities, such as its Regional Cancer Network. To drive the expanded business effectively, the organization depends on its fax infrastructure to exchange information with key healthcare partners.

William Toon, CIO at BHSET, explained, “We send and receive around 1.2 million pages of faxes in a typical year. Faxes support many of our mission-critical processes—from scheduling patient appointments to running insurance verifications. And because hundreds of BHSET employees rely on fax to deliver front-line patient services, it’s crucial that our fax infrastructure is available round the clock.”

In the past, BHSET relied on hardline connections to multifunction devices (MFDs) for the majority of its faxes. However, this approach created significant challenges as the organization grew.

“With so many hardline connections in use across the organization, tracking down and troubleshooting issues with our fax services was a very time-consuming process,” confirmed Toon. “Any interruption to our fax infrastructure has the potential to impact our front-line services, so improving availability was a top priority. Also, telco providers are phasing out analog services, which meant our operational costs were set to rise sharply.”

To solve these challenges, BHSET decided to move to digital faxing. Toon continued, “In addition to reducing the cost and complexity of our fax infrastructure, moving to a modern fax solution would enable us to replace time-consuming paper processes with streamlined digital workflows—giving our clinicians more time to spend with patients.”

Two doctors are having a discussion while using a tablet

With Remote Managed Services for RightFax, we can let OpenText look after our fax infrastructure while we focus on what matters: patient care.

William Toon
CIO, BHSET

Solution

BHSET selected OpenText RightFax Connect—a hybrid fax solution that eliminates the need for analog telephony. Combined with Remote Managed Services from OpenText Professional Services, the new solution enhances availability while reducing costs.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Fax (Rightfax)

Eliminate on-site telephony to simplify the environment and relieve IT staff from the most costly, complex, and cumbersome aspects of deploying

Services provided

OpenText Professional Services

Strategic advice, support, and solutions designed to help organizations achieve business objectives and maximize Return on Investment

Selecting a hybrid fax solution

Based on its positive experiences using OpenText RightFax, BHSET was confident that RightFax Connect was the optimal solution for its long-term requirements.

“With RightFax Connect, we can consolidate all our existing fax infrastructure into a single, reliable cloud service,” said Toon. “Fax is one of the more critical components of how we do business, so the ability to access monitoring and technical support services from OpenText was another important factor in our decision. With Remote Managed Services for RightFax, we can let OpenText look after our fax infrastructure while we focus on what matters: patient care.”

Harnessing managed services

Working with OpenText Professional Services, BHSET deployed, configured, and tested the new RightFax Connect solution. With daily monitoring provided by Remote Managed Services for RightFax, the organization gains the peace of mind that its fax infrastructure will always be available.

“This project was one of the best implementation experiences I’ve ever had in my 25 years in IT,” Toon commented. “From the very beginning, OpenText Professional Services demonstrated a remarkable commitment to our success. Whenever we ran into issues, the team pulled out all the stops to help us.”

Moving smoothly to the cloud

Following a successful solution implementation, BHSET is now working with its telco providers to port its fax numbers to RightFax Connect. Next, the organization plans to harness the solution to build streamlined digital workflows for its local clinics.

“Fax plays a vital role in registering and scheduling patients for treatments and diagnostics,” Toon elaborated. “A packet of documents for a single patient can be up to 20 pages long—and if we don’t receive one of those pages because of a fax issue, it could result in delays for our patients. At the moment, our teams receive these documents as paper faxes and sort through them by hand. In the future, we intend to use a digital integration between RightFax Connect and our electronic medical record systems to handle these tasks automatically.”

A person is talking on the phone while using a tablet

This project was one of the best implementation experiences I’ve ever had in my 25 years in IT. From the very beginning, OpenText Professional Services demonstrated a remarkable commitment to our success. Whenever we ran into issues, the team pulled out all the stops to help us.

William Toon
CIO, BHSET

Results

With RightFax Connect providing secure and reliable fax delivery from the cloud, BHSET has a scalable solution that will accommodate 25% growth in fax volumes over the next three years while reducing annual telco costs by over $200,000.

Boosted availability and saving $200k a year

Currently, BHSET exchanges around 100,000 pages of fax every month, but the organization predicts that these volumes will grow by 25 percent over three years as it continues to expand. With RightFax Connect, the healthcare provider has a strong foundation to support this growth.

“As we take on new clinics and new patients, our need for reliable fax services will only increase,” stated Toon. “With RightFax Connect, we can accommodate rising fax volumes with ease while ensuring high levels of availability.”

Moving its fax connections to the OpenText Cloud will also offer valuable cost-efficiencies. Toon confirms, “By eliminating the need for our analog lines, we’ll avoid the imminent price increases from our telco providers. This will save us over $200,000 a year—funds that we can invest in front-line services.”

Increased clinical efficiency by 20%

By introducing digital workflow capabilities to its clinics, BHSET sees great potential to unlock significant time-savings for clinical teams.

“Our ultimate goal is to route all inbound faxes to a central digital repository, where we can easily see what we’ve received and what’s missing,” said Toon. “Today, our clinicians spend up to two hours a day just sorting through paper records. In the future, those teams will be able to search for a patient’s orders with a couple of clicks—increasing clinical efficiency by up to 20%, minimizing the risk of delays, and enhancing the patient experience.”

Facilitated business expansion

Moving its fax connections to RightFax Connect will also make it easier for BHSET to onboard newly acquired clinics—helping the organization to grow.

“In the past, we had to make an educated guess about the fax volumes we’d need to support for each new clinic, and then lease new MFDs and fax lines,” commented Toon. “With RightFax Connect, we can replace all this manual effort with a digital solution that’s fast to set up and easy to use.”

As it prepares to switch over to RightFax Connect, BHSET is already looking ahead. The healthcare provider plans to work with OpenText to explore ways to harness AI and machine learning capabilities to enhance its fax workflows.

“As we grow and bring in more patients, we must ensure that our processes can handle the volume—and RightFax Connect will help us achieve that,” Toon concluded. “We’ve rarely encountered technology experts who are as knowledgeable and supportive as the OpenText team, and we’re looking forward to working with them in the next stage of our growth journey.”