Provation boosts customer satisfaction, eliminates support issues with Concord Cloud Fax
Provation has been a go-to provider of clinical-productivity software for more than 25 years. Its solutions power end-to-end data flow and capture, allowing providers and personnel across the healthcare continuum to document procedures from start to finish. That means everything from patient engagement communications to document management, revenue optimization, surgical care coordination, anesthesia charge capture, performance optimization, quality reporting, clinical decision support and more. All this activity creates thousands of pages, for hundreds of providers, every day.
When Provation launched Provation® Apex, its cloud-based application, it was time to get fax off the ground as well — but without causing client disruption. Provation partnered with Concord Technologies for cloud fax services that operate within the Provation Apex application, resulting in new data-usage workflows, dramatically reduced fax-based support calls and greatly improved user experience.
“Each of our customers faxes, on average, 2,000 pages per month,” says Andy O’Connell, Director of Product Management. “And more than 25% of our customers rely on outbound fax through Provation for every report they prepare.”
Nimble Concord Cloud Fax enhances application operations
Provation Apex launched in September 2018. The application is designed to reduce the documentation burden on physicians and other providers, and during its development, the Provation team decided it would feature cloud fax technology vs. the aging, legacy faxing setup in use.
“We wanted to equip Provation Apex with cloud faxing capabilities that would help us accelerate customer adoption of our new platform,” explains O’Connell. “The right solution would enhance the Provation Apex user experience while ensuring our customers would not be saddled with unnecessary costs and risks.”
Integrating cloud fax also had to happen quickly and without distracting resources from product development. Several vendors were evaluated for criteria that included ease of integration, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. Concord Technologies’ comprehensive documentation and support around its robust web services APIs allows the Provation team to create an API-based integration between Concord Cloud Fax and Provation Apex in only six weeks from the start to accepted use, and was a huge reason Concord won the business. Another benefit? No custom features needed to be built, and Concord’s “pay only for what you use” pricing model allowed Provation to build faxing costs into the subscription price to further streamline the customer experience.
“We knew we wouldn’t have to build in a lot of new features, because Concord already had them,” O’Connell says. “That included a robust faxing portal and failed fax notifications for users that eliminate daily checks. We were able to mimic a lot of the configurations we had in the past, so our users could still select what document they want to fax and to whom, which is done automatically upon completion of the physician’s procedure note in an electronic health record. The users log in to the Concord web portal to manage their faxes. It became plug-and-play, just as we wanted. It’s easy for our customers to use and low effort for us.”
And it works. “Our customers love the solution!” says O’Connell. “Prior to integrating with Concord, faxing was the second-highest item called into support by time spent and the seventh highest in terms of call volume. In the two years prior to Provation partnering with Concord, there were nearly 900 faxing tickets logged that accounted for almost 800 hours of our support time. Faxing would consistently rank the top 10 support issues by ticket. Our support manager says that now those calls are almost nonexistent — the only reason faxes fail for us now is a due to a bad fax number. That’s a great testament to Concord Technologies.”
User experience will improve with new features
“We put a lot of effort into ease of use,” continues O’Connell. “When providers interact with us, things like demographics, orders, scheduling, imaging, all those things come into Provation. Then we send those documents and images out to different electronic health record (EHR), PAC, and coding and billing systems. We also send notes to referring physicians and do quality reporting, all of which involves the use of Concord’s fax technology. Our users send an extremely high rate of successful faxes, which is a huge benefit for them. They no longer have to check a fax queue every day, freeing up time in their daily workflow to spend with patients.”
The relationship between Provation and Concord continues to deepen. As Provation has grown through acquisitions, it is finding a need for inbound-faxing technology to augment the outbound cloud fax capabilities.
“We are trying to cover more of the end-to-end clinical workflow,” O’Connell says. “We want some of those documents to start coming into Provation and then filed. We have a patient document storage area in our application, and some of our customers are using us as an EHR or a document repository. A lot of users are scanning and uploading, and we want to get rid of those workflows for them if we can. Some of the functionality available from Concord will help get those documents into our application and then get them filed appropriately. That interoperability, that’s really important to Provation. Every minute Concord saves our providers from having to scan, upload, or is another minute they can spend with the patients. The time that you guys save us directly impacts patient care for our customers.”
Company
Provation
Industry
Healthcare Software
Headquarters
Minnesota
Website
www.provationmedical.com
The Problem
Provation created a cloud-based application, Provation Apex, to support document flow for its healthcare clients. It needed a cloud-based, scalable, and well-supported fax solution that could swiftly and seamlessly integrate with Provation Apex to provide safe, secure fax transmission.
The Solution
- Concord Cloud Fax replaced individual, on-premises fax platforms, removing a decentralized, inconsistent model with substantial support issues due to different software, modems, and phone vendors.
- Provation now is in the planning stages for deploying Concord’s data extraction and classification technologies for inbound data to further speed data delivery, streamline workflows and speed data processing.