Concord Cloud Fax Reduces Costs, Saves Staff Time at Professional Rehab Associates
The team at Professional Rehab Associates is all about getting in those 10,000 daily steps. Achieving those numbers walking an endless loop to and from a fax printer all day long, however, was not what they had in mind. Unfortunately, that’s what the clinic’s outmoded way of sending and receiving referrals, insurance paperwork and other documents was requiring.
“Our front-desk team likes to come out and greet patients in the lobby or stop by and say hello in the treatment rooms,” says Dr. Nolan Stewart, PT, DPT, OCS, Owner and President. “They couldn’t do any of that because they were always chasing down paperwork. Concord Technologies’ Cloud Fax has given them, and all of us, a lot more freedom.”
The family-owned clinic, which opened in 1987 and provides physical, occupational, and speech therapy along with preventative and wellness programs, was relying on its multi-function printer as a data-transmission hub. What that meant was fax transmissions that could be interrupted mid-receipt, or during printing, by other jobs. It also meant paper — lots and lots of paper, as well as costly toner — along with the wasted time printing faxes, shredding the unneeded pages, scanning the remainder to a PDF version, typing in some data, and then saving it all to the proper destination.
In late 2020, Concord implemented an integrated solution that bridged the gap between the clinic’s Microsoft suite and WebPT, its EHR. Now users send and receive faxes swiftly and securely directly from their desktop and have gained the ability to direct incoming faxes to a specified, password-protected folder where they can be routed to different workflows. Now everyone knew where the faxes were without checking the printer queue or searching through piles of papers on various desks.
“There would be times when a patient wanted a printed receipt, and just doing that little task would interrupt a 20-plus page faxed referral,” Stewart recalls. “Then we might need to call that doctor’s office, or insurance company, and have them resend. Or it would be something like a signature form — we’d send it, get a signed one back, then have to scan it. That’s a lot of work.”
Lost or Delayed Referrals Affected Revenues and Reputation
In addition to staff time wasted — Stewart estimates the two front-office team members were spending as much as 25% of their day “shuffling paper” — the business also suffered from missed opportunities. There was no time to pursue new client sources, as well as reputational damage from slow responses to patient enquiries and physician referrals. Delays or errors in getting faxed data input into the system also held up authorizations from insurance companies, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
“We get referrals from several different hospitals and health systems, and to meet compliance and other requirements they can run as long as 25 pages,” Stewart says. “If one of those gets hung up in our fax queue, or only partially prints, we may not know about it for hours — even a day. When those providers don’t hear from us, they may move on to someone else. Also, when they have that bad experience, they may be reluctant to make referrals to us again because they want to make sure their patients are being taken care of.”
Easily Accessible Cloud Fax Documents Has Eliminated Those Issues
By late 2021 the clinic was seeing more than 1,000 patients per month, a new record. Stewart credits Concord Cloud Fax, in tandem with the clinic’s EHR and other software platforms, as a driving force behind the operational improvement.
“We are no longer the weak link in the chain between the referral physician or group, or the insurance company or government payor,” he says. “I’d say every quarter we’re making up a day’s worth of business in terms of visits and general operations. That adds up to four or five days a year back into our calendar — well into the thousands when it comes to operational cost savings.”
Wraparound Care from Implementation to Ongoing Support a Differentiator
Even though it was needed, implementing a new fax technology meant a big change for the clinic. Stewart says he was immediately put at ease by the Concord team’s willingness to walk through various options, then customize and implement the right solution for his business needs and workflows.
“Before I even sat in a meeting with Concord our whole system was already laid out in the way we’d need it,” he says. “I was instantly sold.”
Now, he adds, “We can do in three mouse clicks what used to take 20 minutes, or more, before. We are skipping all the steps involved in printing, sorting, and scanning. We can rename documents and place them within our EHR. We don’t have to use our multifunction printer for anything but copying and printing now. And our front-desk staff’s lives are so much easier. This was a very easily implemented solution and huge improvement to our operations. I wish we’d done it 10 years ago.”
Company
Professional Rehab Associates
Industry
Healthcare
Headquarters
Virginia
Website
www.professionalrehabassociates.com
The Problem
Professional Rehab Associates was losing referrals, unable to efficiently process data, and coping with high paper and toner costs with an outdated, unreliable fax process.
The Solution
- Inbound faxes are routed to a folder within the clinic’s Microsoft SharePoint platform via Concord FaxAssist.
- Remote employees have access to Concord’s Email2Fax capabilities.