Johns Hopkins
The Company
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Continuing Medical Education (CME) is an accredited provider of the American Medical Association Physician’s Recognition Award Category 1 Credits.™ Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME offers over 800 educational opportunities a year with over 100,000 attendees.
The Challenge
Several issues were arising while processing their high volume of mandatory daily paperwork consisting of accreditation forms, disclosures, and signed contracts. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME realized that an on-premise fax server solution was not a cost-effective or practical investment. Business continuity was their major concern when utilizing fax machines. Productivity was suffering from the amount of time involved in manually printing, scanning, and faxing documents. Other risks they faced was a higher error rate as many documents would require multiple attempts at faxing and a security risk when confidential faxes were sometimes left out in the open or misplaced. If the recipient was out of the office, delays in processing could occur. In addition, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME needed a reliable centralized fax infrastructure that would provide them with high availability and pandemic planning capabilities which are not available with fax machines. “The majority of our business requires documents to be faxed. If for some reason we were not able to go into the office to work, fax machines would not allow the option of telecommuting, so there would be no way to work from outside of the office,” stated Lorraine Spencer, IT Manager at John Hopkins University School of Medicine CME.
The Solution
After evaluating several solutions, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME chose Concord Fax Online, a hosted IP fax, over a fax machine, due to its ease of deployment, cost, reliability, network capabilities and user friendly interface. IP fax was also a logical solution due to speed of implementation, real-time failover for both inbound and outbound communications and fully-secured data centers that are encrypted; guaranteeing secure communications that is in line with compliance standards.
The Results
IP fax enables employees to securely process accreditation forms, contracts and disclosures and keeps a paper trail for all processing – important given the ever increasing regulations of the industry. Concord Fax Online features a fully redundant IP fax platform that supports multiple secure methods for customers to connect. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME utilizes Concord’s enforced TLS feature which are vital assets to the company’s business need for security. In addition, Concord Fax Online features Fax to Email (F2E) and Email to Fax (E2F) where you receive faxes by simply attaching one or multiple files to an email message. When the email is sent to the Concord network, the attachments are processed and transformed into a format suitable for delivery to fax machines. The fax is then delivered to its destination fax machine anywhere in the world. The fax transmission is completed within moments. Delivery status is returned to the sender in the form of an email message. These features provide Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME employees with the added security benefit of having all faxes safely stored and eliminate the risk of misplacing important documents with confidential information. Concord Fax Online also proved to be more cost effective for Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME as it drastically decreased printing and supplies costs. “Concord Fax Online solutions is saving us 60% over our previous process. I am very happy with the service they provide. From an IT perspective, it’s really easy to support,” stated Spencer. Employees are more productive, service their clients faster, and have the electronic tools at their fingertips to securely process mandatory paperwork for accreditation, contracts and disclosures. Using an IP Fax has enabled organizations to operate, collaborate, and transfer data, efficiently and inexpensively on a global basis. Concord Fax Online provides a reliable centralized IT infrastructure with high availability and pandemic planning capabilities to maintain business continuity. The integration of Concord Fax Online enables Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine CME employees to communicate more efficiently by sharing and exchanging files in a secure, real-time environment which helps in speeding up the decision making process.
“Concord Fax Online solutions is saving us 60% over our previous process. I am very happy with the service they provide. From an IT perspective, it’s really easy to support.”
Lorraine Spencer, IT Manager Johns Hopkins University OCM