Midwestern health system enables faster records sharing

• 1 million pages of information sent by fax each year
• Faxing documents by hand consumed valuable time and drove up cost
• New EHR system unable to send faxes, leading to manual workarounds

As health systems across the United States prepare for the needs of an aging population, preventative care is becoming an important focus area. By addressing health issues earlier, this midwestern health system aims to promote better patient outcomes and experiences.

To deliver effective care, clinicians frequently refer patients within the health system or to external providers, and the shift to preventative treatment will make referrals even more important. The health system relies on faxes to share information with a wide range of stakeholders—including its hospitals and clinics, local physician practices, insurance companies and other healthcare networks.

A spokesperson for the health system says, “Many clinical and back-office staff send faxes regularly, totaling approximately 1 million pages per year. Sharing information in a timely manner is vital—both for the patient experience and to comply with regulatory requirements such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA].”

To improve information management across all its service lines, the health system recently standardized on a single electronic health record (EHR) system. While the solution offers more comprehensive patient histories and enhanced healthcare information management capabilities, employees were unable to send faxes directly from the application, leading to time-consuming manual work.

“Employees need to send out individual patient results, whole charts and everything in between,” continues the spokesperson. “As a workaround, our people would print the records from the EHR system, walk them over to a multi-function device [MFD] and fax them manually. As well as driving up our paper and printing costs, this approach diverted hundreds of hours of valuable time each year that could otherwise be spent on patient care.”

“Another challenge was that our telecoms provider was preparing to upgrade our fax lines from Primary Rate Interface [PRI] to Session Initiation Protocol [SIP] trunks, which would have required complex and costly modifications to our existing fax environment. Our lean IT team was already spending up to six hours per week troubleshooting issues with manual faxing, and we couldn’t dedicate the resources required for such a complex project.”