The University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City is a world-class academic medical center and destination for complex care and diagnosis. The organization’s physicians are researchers and educators expanding the boundaries of medical knowledge.

Clinicians:

1,000+
Employees:

14,000+
Based in:

Kansas City, Kansas
Locations:

100+ hospitals and clinics

Summary

Challenges

Fax transmission error rates were rising as local telcos reduced support for analog fax solutions.
Manually resending faxes consumed valuable time and diverted clinicians from care services.

Solution

Moved to a hybrid-cloud telephony solution that integrated with the organization’s Epic electronic health record system.
Rapidly deployed the solution by leveraging trusted professional services.

Results

Eliminated transmission errors for timely delivery
Reduced IT maintenance workloads by up to 90%
Enhanced the resilience of mission-critical fax systems

Challenges

Local telcos reducing support for analog fax solutions
Fax transmission errors on the rise
Employees spent significant time resending faxes
90% of IT time spent troubleshooting fax issues

Committed to providing quality healthcare, The University of Kansas Health System is a world-leading academic medical center that specializes in providing diagnoses and complex care for patients with serious conditions. The organization operates in over 100 locations throughout the Kansas City metro and state of Kansas and works with more than 1,000 physicians across its network.

Caring for patients generates significant amounts of data, including patient medical records, referrals, reports and much more. To deliver timely, effective care services, it’s crucial for clinicians at The University of Kansas Health System to share important information quickly and securely with internal departments and external partners, such as partners in patient care and family doctors.

For many years, The University of Kansas Health System used an on-premises fax solution comprising over 200 fax channels. However, as local telco providers began to withdraw support for fax services, the health system needed to find alternative options. The organization looked for a way to boost reliability and minimize the risk of disruption to care services.

Garrett Daniels, systems administration applications manager at the University of Kansas Health System, explained, “The success rate for sending faxes was falling, which meant employees had to regularly check that information had been sent to the relevant system or department, and resend it if it hadn’t—potentially diverting our people from front-line care duties.”

Dwayne Reeves, solution architect at The University of Kansas Health System, added, “Our enterprise information systems team manages many different critical applications, but due to the high fax transmission error rate, we spent approximately 90% of our time troubleshooting faxes, and we’d often work overtime to keep information flowing.”

Making the move to cloud with OpenText RightFax Connect has helped us to modernize and future-proof our vital fax infrastructure.

Garrett Daniels
Systems Administration Applications Manager, The University of Kansas Health System

Solution

To boost reliability and reduce IT management workloads, The University of Kansas Health System moved to a hybrid-cloud telephony solution, powered by OpenText™ RightFax™ Connect.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Fax (Rightfax)

Simplify digital faxing with a hybrid option

Services provided

OpenText™ Customer Support TechConnect

Assemble a dream team to maximize your solution
OpenText™ Professional Services

Get a trusted partner to guide your Information Management path

Switching to a hybrid-cloud fax

A long-term OpenText™ RightFax™ customer, The University of Kansas Health System had many years of success with its on-premises fax servers prior to the telco support issues with its analog lines. The company decided to assess RightFax Connect to verify that the hybrid-cloud solution would meet its long-term requirements.

“Our proof of concept clearly demonstrated that OpenText RightFax Connect was the right solution for The University of Kansas Health System,” commented Daniels. “The solution offers us the tight integration with our Epic electronic health record solution that we had from the previous OpenText RightFax deployment, while eliminating the need for fax boards and manual administration work.”

Accelerating deployment with trusted professional services

To boost the reliability of fax transmission, The University of Kansas Health System aimed to implement RightFax Connect as quickly as possible. The organization worked closely with a dedicated porting project manager from OpenText Professional Services to achieve a fast switchover to the cloud.

“Thanks to the guidance we received from the OpenText Professional Services and OpenText Customer Support TechConnect teams, we were able to build our proof of concept of OpenText RightFax Connect in less than 24 hours—and then we took a further two days to test the solution,” said Reeves. “Because we had already carried out most of the implementation work in this initial phase, the switchover was simple. It was just like flicking a switch. After just 10 minutes, all our fax telephony was live in the cloud.”

Daniels added: “We found OpenText’s instructor-led training and online resources very useful and accessible—it was easy to get answers to our questions during the deployment.”

By letting information flow seamlessly across the organization with OpenText RightFax Connect, our clinicians can focus on doing what they do best: providing our patients with world-class care.

Dwayne Reeves
Solution Architect, The University of Kansas Health System

Results

Since switching to RightFax Connect, The University of Kansas Health System has eliminated its reliance on analog telephony—helping to future-proof its fax environment and prevent transmission errors.

Eliminated transmission errors for timely delivery

With RightFax Connect, The University of Kansas Health System has boosted its transmission success rate to almost 100%. As a result, clinicians, care providers and external partners can now share critical information quickly and reliably to support effective care services.

“With OpenText RightFax Connect, all faxes reach the right destination the first time around,” explained Daniels. “This means our teams no longer have to worry about faxes failing or spend time checking for delivery errors. With OpenText, our employees and partners can always access the very latest information on patient care, referrals, operational reports and more.”

Reduced IT maintenance workloads by 90%

With the cloud faxing solution running seamlessly around-the-clock, IT teams save time on troubleshooting fax errors.

“We have virtually eliminated the need to touch our fax solution, reducing IT maintenance workloads by around 90%,” reflected Reeves. “Because we aren’t constantly firefighting issues, we have so much more time to spend on maintaining the many other applications that underpin our operations. As a result, we no longer have to work overtime to remediate fax issues, which has massively boosted morale and greatly improved the team’s work-life balance.”

Enhanced the resilience of mission-critical fax systems

By sending and receiving faxes securely via the cloud, The University Kansas Health Systems ended its dependency on analog lines—helping to boost the resiliency of its systems.

Daniels commented, “Making the move to cloud with OpenText RightFax Connect has modernized our vital fax infrastructure.”

Reeves concluded, “By letting information flow seamlessly across the organization with OpenText RightFax Connect, our clinicians can focus on doing what they do best: providing our patients with world-class care.”