The Daily Reality for Care Coordinators
Every morning, care coordinators walk into the same storm. Before the first cup of coffee, their inboxes are already stacked with referrals, discharges, and prior-authorization packets—arriving via fax, Direct Secure Messages (DSM), portals, and even snail mail.
Each communication is critical. Each represents a patient whose care depends on timely, complete, and accurate information.
Instead of focusing on patients, coordinators spend hours stitching fragmented communication together into a single story:
- Patient information arrives in many formats (faxed notes, scanned labs, email attachments, portal exports).
- Details are spread across multiple portals and systems.
- Files often miss key patient identifiers or bury important information.
- Manual matching to patient charts is slow and error-prone.
- Inconsistent or incomplete data forces follow-up before care can move forward.
Care coordinators manage critical patient information arriving through fax, DSM, portals, and email—each with different formats, levels of completeness, and degrees of structure. Without a unified intake workflow, they must manually reconcile these channels to understand what arrived, where it belongs, and what action is required. The result is constant disjointed processes and avoidable delays in care coordination.
Direct Secure Messaging (DSM) provides a standardized, HIPAA-compliant method for exchanging clinical patient information between providers. It ensures messages are encrypted, from trusted senders and structured for interoperability, reducing errors and delays. For care coordinators, integrating DSM into the patient intake process means critical data—such as referrals, discharge summaries, and lab results—arrives in a secure, consistent format that can be automatically routed and reconciled. This streamlines workflows, minimizes manual effort, and accelerates care coordination. Let’s dive further into this by exploring some use cases.
How Disjointed Data Complicates Care
Below are real-world use cases illustrating the “first mile” obstacles coordinators face—and how a unified DSM + Digital fax platform help solve them.
Use Case 1: Multi-Modal Intake & Manual Triage
A care coordinator at a cardiology clinic logs in to find 63 new items scattered across systems:
- 28 faxes (referrals, prior auths, lab requests)
- 14 DSM messages (standardized in theory, mixed in quality)
- 21 portal exports (emailed attachments from “noreply” accounts)
Before the coordinator can even prioritize, they must open each item, identify the patient, and determine routing.
Pain Point: Manual triage consumes hours daily. According to a Concord Technologies survey of top 500 health systems, 60% of healthcare leaders report full-time admin staff spend 4+ hours/day triaging fax documents.
With Concord: A unified platform presents fax and DSM together. AI extracts key info from faxes, routes referrals to the referral queue, sends medical-record requests to another queue, and enables Straight-Through Processing to the patient chart. Coordinators see an organized dashboard instead of multiple inboxes.
Use Case 2: Incomplete Referrals
A PCP sends a cardiology referral with demographics—but no labs. Traditionally this means:
- phone calls for labs
- portal logins for medication history
- patient consent requests
- fax retries for imaging
Pain Point: Referrals frequently arrive incomplete, forcing coordinators to rebuild the clinical picture manually.
With Concord Connect: DSM content, such as C-CDAs and lab results, is parsed, routed, and integrated directly into the EHR. Fewer gaps. Fewer phone calls. Faster care coordination.
Use Case 3: Hospital Discharge to Specialist Coordination (Mixed DSM + Fax)
A discharge summary arrives via DSM as a structured C-CDA, but the updated med-rec sheet still comes via fax. The fax requires manual keying into the patient chart.
Pain Point: Even as DSM adoption increases, many supporting documents still arrive by fax, requiring reconciliation between structured and unstructured data.
With Concord Connect: DSM and digital fax appear in one unified workflow. AI simplifies matching faxed documents to charts, while DSM preserves structure. Coordinators reconcile mixed formats without slowing down.
Compliance Note: Unified intake keeps access role-based and auditable, reducing shadow copies of PHI and enforcing “minimum necessary” disclosure.
Use Case 4: Closing the Loop Between Specialist and Primary Care
A specialist sends a visit summary. In many organizations, it lands in a generic inbox, relying on a coordinator to notice, forward, and hope it reaches the PCP. Often, information on patient care is not effectively shared across providers, the communication loop never closes, resulting in fragmented care, delayed or duplicated treatments, avoidable errors, and poorer outcomes for patients.
Pain Point: PCPs lack visibility into specialty care, resulting in incomplete patient records.
With Concord Connect: DSM supports transitions of care and is received alongside fax in a unified queue. Straight-Through Processing matches the summary to the correct patient and pushes it automatically to the EHR—closing the loop without manual handling.
Compliance Note: DSM preserves provenance (sender identity, timestamps, delivery receipts) and maintains an auditable, end-to-end trail for HIPAA compliance.
Eliminating the Tedious Tasks of Care Coordination
Many care coordination delays stem from time-consuming manual tasks that add no clinical value but still require significant staff effort. When teams are forced to identify, route, and reconcile inbound information by hand, care slows before it even begins.
Each of these steps adds friction to care coordination without adding clinical value:
- Open documents simply to identify type or destination
- Manually route documents to the correct team
- Key in MRNs from PDFs
- Check multiple portals and inboxes
- Call to confirm, “Did you get my fax?”
- Copy/paste medication lists between documents
Why Care Transitions Break
It’s not a lack of effort—it’s fragmented processes and siloed data.
Problem | Impact |
Multiple communication channels (fax, portals, email, EHR messages) | Fragmented data, missed attachments |
Unstructured formats (scanned PDFs, free text) | No automation, error-prone handling |
Unverified recipients | Missed delivery, HIPAA risk |
No audit trail | No accountability or SLA enforcement |
Manual triage & inconsistent processing | High labor costs, delays |
DSM provides the foundation for structured, identity-verified exchange.
Concord completes the process with intelligent processing of both fax and DSM data, patient matching, workflow automation, and seamless EHR delivery.
The Bigger Picture
Multiply a coordinator’s day by thousands of daily handoffs across hospitals, ambulatory care, post-acute care, and skilled nursing facilities. Every delay increases friction and raises the risk of missed information.
With unified communication channels, DSM, intelligent document processing, and EHR-integrated workflows, coordinators spend less time chasing documents—and more time coordinating care.
This is what Concord means by Straight-Through Processing:
Not just faster messages, but communication that becomes coordinated care with minimal manual intervention.
With Concord Connect™, healthcare organizations can manage inbound communication across multiple modalities including Direct Secure Messaging, digital fax, and document uploads within a single intake workflow. Structured payloads such as C-CDAs, along with unstructured documents and attachments, are delivered into the same queue instead of being fragmented across systems. Concord Connect intelligently classifies, parses, and routes this content to downstream workflows, reducing manual triage and helping organizations move toward faster, more reliable care coordination.
What Concord Connect™ Allows Healthcare Organizations to Do
Here’s what that looks like in real life:
- Securely and reliably manage DSM and digital fax in unified queues, creating a single, organized workflow.
- Improve care coordination via patient matching and Straight-Through Processing that routes data into the correct record automatically or with minimal intervention.
- Enhance team collaboration with robust tools and shared workspaces.
- Accelerate data extraction and interpretation using Concord’s Practical AI™.
- Build trust with confidence indicators and transparent AI models.
- Seamlessly integrate data into back-office systems via flexible APIs and HL7/FHIR connections.
Transition of care will never be simple, but communication supporting it can be. By harmonizing DSM with digital fax and automating the intake process, healthcare organizations can reduce context switching and unlock true Straight-Through Processing.
Want to see what a unified platform for intake could look like for your team? Let’s map out your highest-friction handoff and show you where automation can take over.
¹ IJSAT – Enhancing Efficiency in Healthcare: The Role of Digitizing Faxed Documents and Automating Workflows