Elder Services of Worcester gains single-solution simplicity with Concord Cloud Fax
Unified, reliable faxing platform lets care provider focus on delivering services
The team at Elder Services of Worcester Area (ESWA) knows all about handling late-life challenges—for people, not a fax service. That’s why, when it became apparent that a new fax solution was needed, the agency turned to Concord Technologies for a reliable, secure platform to serve them now and in the future.
A lot of information flows into ESWA, and it’s essential that it gets to the right parties, right away. The non-profit agency helps seniors aged 65 and older, and younger disabled individuals, with a variety of support services, allowing them to stay in their homes vs. having to move into a care- or assisted-living facility. Case workers conduct a rigorous assessment to see what aid might be needed, and then provide everything from light housekeeping and food preparation to grocery shopping, meals on wheels and more. ESWA works with MassHealth, the Massachusetts state agency that oversees Medicaid, as well as multiple local agencies and service providers, which means plenty of paperwork and status updates that can’t go missing, says Nick Martunas, IT Manager.
Sunsetting fax systems create unworkable fax delivery
“We have caseworkers coming in and out and filing reports, and we also have a nursing department which is a very high-volume fax user,” Martunas says. “We have a lot to stay on top of, and we were using a pieced-together system of on-premise and digital fax to do it. We’d been relying in part on an inbound main fax line that came into a standalone multi-function printer, and then the receptionist would get the faxes out to the appropriate recipients. We also had another fax machine in a different department, as well as another line feeding into a copier. And finally, we had a digital fax vendor for our nursing and nutrition departments, but it struggled with really large faxes.”
The hope had been that the digital fax provider would eventually process all the agency’s inbound and outbound fax traffic through a single portal. However, soon after that system was up and running there were problems, Martunas recalls.
“Within the first year [the digital fax provider] changed the pricing model, and our cost went way up,” he explains. “There also were no tracking capabilities, so if a nurse deleted a fax it was gone. We couldn’t get an accurate count of what was coming in and out. We were having trouble getting larger faxes from hospitals and medical providers. Referrals were getting missed. We couldn’t operate like that.”
In addition, he adds, “We also began to have some problems with the fax software, and whether it was communicating to the server. There also were some end-of-life issues we were unaware of, that were going to require significant upgrades. We didn’t want to invest more money into something that was only going to work for 80% of the staff at most. We needed another solution.”
Concord Cloud Fax provides predictability, efficiency
ESWA wanted to move completely away from on-premises faxing and into the cloud, so Martunas and his team came to Concord for help. Concord’s experienced implementation team quickly consolidated the agency’s on-premises and digital fax solutions into a fully digital, interconnected fax platform that provides visibility into fax-transmission status, archiving capabilities and much more.
“When we switched over to Concord, we tested and found that those larger faxes magically started going through,” Martunas says. “I have not heard one time from our nursing team about a fax issue, and that has been amazing. The implementation was just great; Concord’s team worked with us to roll it out vs. training everyone on the first day, which was helpful. The ongoing support has been great as well, any questions we’ve had have been answered in a very reasonable amount of time. Concord got right in, changed the way we were doing things and it has really worked.”
Company
Elder Services of Worcester Area
Industry
Healthcare
Headquarters
Massachusetts
Website
www.eswa.org
The Problem
Elder Services of Worcester Area had a complicated, unworkable mix of digital and on-premises fax operations, none of which were delivering reliably.
The Solution
- Faxes are sent and received through the Concord Cloud Fax Email2Fax and Fax2Email solutions.
- A general domain address was established to manage all fax users.
- A scalable solution means ESWA can add other outside-platform integrations when needed, as well as additional features for data extraction and processing.