OrthoVirginia Eliminates Failed Faxes by switching to FAXCOM with Epic Integration
OrthoVirginia was merging four separate locations across the state to consolidate systems and develop common processes across all areas and offices. Each region, had its own legacy systems, different EMRs, and faxing solutions which included a mix of traditional fax machines, PRIs, and a lot of analog lines.
The disparity systems across the locations were not working and were causing OrthoVirginia to have high fax error rates which in turn impacted their patient’s care.
On average, only 93.3% of the system’s 37,000 outbound faxes sent each month were successfully delivered within 24 hours (or about 112 failed faxes a day). The support staff could spend an entire day working on the failed fax queue and still not successfully resend or resolve all the failures.
“Healthcare is a time-sensitive industry. It’s painful when faxing doesn’t work. It’s integral to internal and external workflow processes,” shared Ted Kraje, Senior IT Systems Engineer at OrthoVirginia. “Insurers need documentation to approve coverage. Lawyers are expecting releases of information turned around quickly for cases. We have to pass preoperative information like EKGs, allergy lists, and anesthesia info to surgical centers, or surgeries can’t move forward.”
Integration with Epic EHR
The situation changed with OrthoVirginia’s implementation of Biscom, a Concord Techonologies Company’s, FAXCOM with Epic integration. “We chose Epic for our EHR, and we knew Biscom had a good relationship with Epic and a tight integration with the system, so that made it the logical choice for fax,” said Kraje. “The biggest impact is that the percentage of successful faxes has skyrocketed. We are running a 98.6% successful fax rate now – that’s only 24 failed faxes a day that needs to be tracked down manually.”
Saving costs and paper with a simple configuration
Eliminating Paper Fax Saves Money and Trees
Implementing FAXCOM allowed OrthoVirginia to send and receive faxes electronically, rather than printing reams of paper and scanning them. Not having to take that step is a huge time saver.
“The amount of paper costs alone that we’re avoiding probably pays for my salary. I’m not the ‘Lorax’,” said Kraje, referring to the well-known environmentalist of Dr. Seuss’s stories, “but geez, we must be saving trees. And then there is overall time efficiency. Every time you have to print to paper, it slows your business process down.
Intelligent Fax Server Reduces Costs
Another component of the time savings is the ability to easily consolidate multiple faxes into a single fax. “That’s really easy to do with Biscom’s fax solution. For example, if you are responding to a release of information request and you want to send two different things from two places in Epic:
1. Document from some legacy application.
2. Electronic form.
Now with FAXCOM, you can include that all in one fax. We’re not sending four faxes with four cover sheets anymore – we are sending one.”
Kraje also explained how the system helped reduce long-distance telephone bills. “Least Cost Routing is another out-of-the-box financial benefit. OrthoVirginia offices exist across Virginia in multiple area codes. FAXCOM has this excellent functionality called Least Cost Routing, or LCR, where if I needed to send a fax from my office in Central Virginia (area code 434) to a fax number in Northern Virginia (area code 703), it wouldn’t need to send a long-distance call from my local fax gateway. Instead, FAXCOM would route the outbound fax to our fax gateway in the 703 area code, and then make a local call.”
Simple Fax Server Configuration
“Honestly, the software implementation was easy. It was very simple to configure. I always watch software consultants like a hawk when they are configuring their systems. With FAXCOM, I watched how they set up the first couple of queues and then took over and finished the rest. The more time-consuming part of the project was working with end users to help change their processes from ‘Print to Paper’ and manually faxing to ‘Print to fax’. Change is always hard for folks. In my experience, in a successful software implementation, you shouldn’t need to spend the majority of your time configuring the software – you should spend the majority of your time working with users and helping them adapt to the change.”
Kraje also shared a personal perspective on the importance of a reliable and well-supported fax solution. “My mother recently had knee replacement surgery and was in a lot of pain beforehand. I can’t imagine how she would have held up if that surgery had been delayed over late or lost paperwork. When something impacts faxing, it’s like living in a nightmare.”
By working with Biscom, OrthoVirginia was able to reduce the time staff spent chasing down missing clinical documentation by 88% and streamline the process of faxing through their internal system.
Company
OrthoVirginia
Industry
Healthcare
Headquarters
Virginia
Website
www.orthovirginia.com
The Problem
OrthoVirginia had four locations throughout the state with different systems causing high fax error rates. Support staff was spending too much time managing a failed fax queue.
The Solution
OrthoVirginia implemented FAXCOM with Epic Integration achieving:
- Single consolidated fax management solution integrated with Epic
- A reliable fax solution that significantly decreased the failure rate
- 8X improvement in overall productivity