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midwesternMidwestern health system enables faster records sharing

Healthcare provider replaces on-premises faxing with OpenText™ RightFax™ Connect, cutting costs and saving front-line staff hundreds of hours per year

midwestern

About the health system

This health system operates in midwestern United States, providing high-quality care through a network of hundreds of medical professionals and affiliates.

health system
  • Based in:
    USA
  • Faxes per year:
    1 million

Summary

Challenges

  • 1 million pages were faxed each year.
  • New electronic health record (EHR) system was unable to send faxes.
  • Printing records on paper and faxing them by hand consumed valuable time and drove up costs.

Solution

  • Integrated with the health system’s EHR, enabling printing directly from the application.
  • Provided training and support during and after deployment.
  • Simplified IT support and maintenance processes.

Results

  • Eliminated time-consuming manual tasks
  • Reduced print volumes and capital costs

Challenges

  • 1 million pages of information sent by fax each year
  • Faxing documents by hand consumed valuable time and drove up cost
  • New EHR system unable to send faxes, leading to manual workarounds

As health systems across the United States prepare for the needs of an aging population, preventative care is becoming an important focus area. By addressing health issues earlier, this midwestern health system aims to promote better patient outcomes and experiences.

To deliver effective care, clinicians frequently refer patients within the health system or to external providers, and the shift to preventative treatment will make referrals even more important. The health system relies on faxes to share information with a wide range of stakeholders—including its hospitals and clinics, local physician practices, insurance companies and other healthcare networks.

A spokesperson for the health system says, “Many clinical and back-office staff send faxes regularly, totaling approximately 1 million pages per year. Sharing information in a timely manner is vital—both for the patient experience and to comply with regulatory requirements such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA].”

To improve information management across all its service lines, the health system recently standardized on a single electronic health record (EHR) system. While the solution offers more comprehensive patient histories and enhanced healthcare information management capabilities, employees were unable to send faxes directly from the application, leading to time-consuming manual work.

“Employees need to send out individual patient results, whole charts and everything in between,” continues the spokesperson. “As a workaround, our people would print the records from the EHR system, walk them over to a multi-function device [MFD] and fax them manually. As well as driving up our paper and printing costs, this approach diverted hundreds of hours of valuable time each year that could otherwise be spent on patient care.”

“Another challenge was that our telecoms provider was preparing to upgrade our fax lines from Primary Rate Interface [PRI] to Session Initiation Protocol [SIP] trunks, which would have required complex and costly modifications to our existing fax environment. Our lean IT team was already spending up to six hours per week troubleshooting issues with manual faxing, and we couldn’t dedicate the resources required for such a complex project.”

health system

Our employees use OpenText RightFax Connect to fax directly from our EHR, saving time, paper and ink. By eliminating the need for new fax boards, we estimate that we’re avoiding capital costs of around $800 per fax machine.

Anonymous
Spokesperson, midwestern health system

Solution

To empower employees to send faxes directly from the new EHR system, the health system selected RightFax Connect. The solution allowed the organization to replace its on-premises fax infrastructure with simple hybrid-cloud telephony.

Products deployed

Integrating with the existing EHR system

“Of all the solutions we evaluated, only OpenText offered the tight EHR system compatibility that we were looking for,” comments the spokesperson. “We were also extremely impressed with how easy OpenText RightFax Connect was to deploy. After just a couple of hours working with an OpenText sales engineer on a proof of concept, we’d already built a functioning test environment that could send faxes directly from the EHR system.”

The health system consumes EHR capabilities as a managed service, hosted at an external data center. The spokesperson continues, “Although we don’t manage our own EHR infrastructure, deploying the OpenText solution was very straightforward. Our EHR vendor simply installed a lightweight print driver on the EHR server, and we were ready to go.”

Ensuring a smooth deployment

Working with experts from OpenText Professional Services, the health system configured and tested RightFax Connect. Throughout the initial deployment and beyond, OpenText provided training and shared best practices—helping the organization create shared address books and integrate the new solution with its new fleet of MFDs.

Shrinking support and maintenance needs

Since switching to RightFax Connect, the health system’s IT team has seen support calls to its helpdesk drop, and support requests become faster and easier to resolve.

“In the past, partial or midstream failures were relatively common, but those types of issues are essentially a thing of the past,” the spokesperson elaborates. “Before, it was also common for members of the IT team to travel out to our clinics and hospitals to investigate issues, but now we can diagnose almost everything remotely—saving us around six hours per week. When we need extra help or advice, we know that OpenText is only a phone call away.”

We’re already helping our front-line workers save significant amounts of time, and we’re very excited to work with OpenText to realize the full potential of our hybrid fax solution.

Anonymous
Spokesperson, midwestern health system

Results

Today, the health system is using the OpenText solution to free employees from manual faxing tasks. The new approach saves hundreds of hours per year while reducing annual paper and printing costs by thousands of dollars.

Eliminated time-consuming manual tasks

For clinics sending out 10 referrals per day, employees can save around 45 minutes by faxing directly from the EHR.

“When you factor in that our new cloud-based solution is also far more reliable than our previous fax environment, the time we’re saving across the entire health system is probably even greater—allowing the organization to redirect resources back into front-line patient services. The time we’re saving will make it easier to collaborate with a growing number of healthcare stakeholders in the future, which will help us meet our objectives around preventative care,” the spokesperson explains.

Reduced print volumes and capital costs

Today, employees use RightFax Connect to fax directly from the EHR, saving time, paper and ink.

“During the evaluation process, we saw that OpenText RightFax Connect is widely used in the healthcare sector, and I can now see why so many organizations trust the solution,” says the spokesperson. “By eliminating the need for new fax boards, we estimate that we’re avoiding capital costs of around $800 per fax machine. Reliability has dramatically improved, too—and thanks to the cloud-based management dashboard, we’ve cut troubleshooting time substantially.”

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