Premier Medical Group

Challenges

Premier Medical Group has been experiencing rapid growth in order to meet the healthcare needs of the Phoenix area. In recent months, the group has added five healthcare practices to its fold for a total of eight primary care providers. This growth is expected to reach an estimated 10 independent practices with 35 primary care providers within the next few months. Ultimately, the group envisions a much larger practice of roughly 100 to 150 providers. However, the group’s existing fax solution could not meet the needs of this increasing number of healthcare providers.

Increasing fax volumes

Dr. Sunny Maheshwari, Executive Board Director at Premier Medical Group, described the existing fax system: “We had two desktops with modems in our server room—one desktop for incoming faxes and one desktop for outgoing faxes.”

However, the group recognized that as the organization continued to grow, multiple staff would need to send faxes at the same time—a challenge with only one phone line. “Waiting is not really a viable option. For example, patients want their prescriptions within a certain period of time once they leave the office. It usually takes a patient five to 10 minutes to get to the pharmacy. If the prescription is not there, we start getting callbacks,” explained Maheshwari. Premier Medical Group needed a solution that could handle multiple faxes at the same time, especially during peak business hours.

Secure management of patient data

Security of patient health information was also a key concern for the company. “Incoming faxes were being stored on our servers and what we’re finding is that we can’t have these independent servers floating around that are holding patient data. We needed a secure system where these servers can be centralized and all the documents can be in one location. And of course, meeting HIPAA compliance as well,” said Maheshwari.

In need of a new fax solution and not really knowing what options were available, other than adding more phone lines and trying to manage it themselves, the group moved from its two-modem, in-house server solution to a cloud-based service. However, it quickly became apparent that the cost of the online fax service was going to be much higher than expected.

Solution

Going back to the drawing board, Premier Medical Group set out to find a cost-effective solution that could grow with the company and address the specific concerns of the healthcare industry. “With medicine, every day is a challenge. There are new things that come up, whether it is HIPAA requirements, secure faxing or patient compliance. Trying to partner with the right company is important to our organization to make sure that we have the ability to scale, do things in a clear, systematic manner and to make sure that resources are available so that as we continue to grow, we can troubleshoot problems and address them,” said Maheshwari.

RightFax: The leading fax server solution in healthcare

The group began looking at alternatives to its expensive online fax solution. After careful consideration, it selected RightFax, which is a centralized fax server solution that integrates with desktop and business applications and offers secure, high-volume, automated faxing capabilities.

The OpenText solution met Premier Medical Group’s need to cut costs. “Cost is one of the most important differentiators because, at the end of the day, people count every penny. The OpenText solution was far more cost effective,” said Maheshwari. Compared to the other solutions that the group was evaluating, OpenText also stood out in terms of its responsive service. “I didn’t even get calls back from one of the other vendors. I think OpenText certainly excelled from a customer service standpoint,” said Maheshwari.

The ability to integrate with the company’s existing applications was another deciding factor in selecting OpenText. As the leading fax server in healthcare, RightFax integrates fax with email, desktop, and document management applications, and enables high-volume, automated fax delivery from CRM, ERP, ECM, vertical and other host applications. In particular, Premier Medical Group needed tight integration with its NextGen healthcare applications. “That level of integration with NextGen was really important to us, and OpenText certainly delivered on that,” said Maheshwari.

Premier Medical Group’s need for a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution led them to add on RightFax Connect, which combines cloud-based fax delivery with the on-premises RightFax server for an end-to-end, hybrid cloud fax solution. RightFax Connect simplifies a RightFax deployment by eliminating the time and cost of configuring, troubleshooting and implementing fax boards, gateways, capacity planning, channels and phone lines, and instead taking the telephony component to the cloud. In addition, the solution delivers flexible cloud faxing that scales automatically to provide capacity for large fax volumes, including bursts and peaks.

“The RightFax Connect solution was a lot more scalable to accommodate the growth we are experiencing. Rather than allocating four ports, six ports, eight ports, or 16 ports for fax volume capacity—we don’t really know how many we actually need—it was better to go with a solution that is managed essentially in the cloud by OpenText,” explained Maheshwari.

Benefits

Rapid, seamless deployment with OpenText Professional Services

Premier Medical Group reports that the transition to the RightFax solution was an easy one, thanks to OpenText Professional Services. “It has been a very smooth and seamless transition. RightFax has saved us time to do some of the things that we needed to do,” said Maheshwari.

“The biggest benefit to an owner is a minimal number of hiccups because any time a hiccup occurs, it always goes right to the top. With our deployment of OpenText, no issues were brought to my attention, meaning we had a successful launch and ongoing deployment of these solutions.” 

Secure and scalable

With the powerful simplicity of cloud-based telephony, the company can now send and receive multiple faxes at the same time. In addition, the solution keeps the content secure with encryption at rest and in transit. “With RightFax, the faxes are in a secure environment so that when we do our security risk analysis, we do not have to worry about patient data sitting somewhere and worry about what needs to be done with that. I think that is very beneficial,” said Maheshwari.

Streamlined process delivers time and cost savings

With the tight integration of RightFax and NextGen, the new solution has allowed staff to shave time off fax handling because items are pre-configured to go directly into NextGen. In the past, a fax used to come in to the server and was stored. Staff would go through each fax, do a NextGen ICS (Image Control System) badge, convert the file into a NextGen viewable file and then put it into a patient’s chart, all of which took approximately one minute per fax. “With RightFax, we’ve trimmed about 15 to 20 seconds from that, maybe a little bit more depending on how large the file is, because we don’t have to process it anymore. It is pre-processed into a NextGen viewable file, so we’re just dropping it in patient charts, essentially,” said Maheshwari.

Future

Looking ahead, Premier Medical Group plans to continue centralizing its business applications, including email. “Once we have a centralized email application, we will need the functionality to start sending faxes or do different things directly from email. Also, some of our offices have multi-function copiers, so we’ve purchased a RightFax module for that. We just need to implement it and we will see increased efficiency,” said Maheshwari. “OpenText was the right partner to go with, and I think we’ll continue to grow together as we expand and take advantage of the resources that OpenText has for us.”