Customer stories

Sharp Community Medical Group

Sharp Community Medical Group transforms information exchange with hybrid faxing solution. U.S. healthcare provider entrusts critical patient information to OpenText RightFax and OpenText RightFax Connect for efficient, reliable faxing

Challenges

  • High fax failure rate and slow fax delivery with previous solution
  • Delays in delivering clinical information
  • Excessive manual work needed to fill fax delivery gap

Results

  • Enhanced patient care with reliable, timely faxing

  • Reduced fax complaints from 5-7 per day to 5-7 per quarter

  • Decreased fax failure rates by 10-15%

Story

“Faxing is an absolutely necessary component of our system, given that we coordinate patient care between disparate healthcare organizations,” explained Brant Burington, manager of Technical Services and Support. “We use it extensively to transfer clinical information.”

Sharp Community Medical Group

OpenText RightFax has been a huge win for us. We have gone from faxing being a real pain point in our system to actually becoming a strength. Our user community knows this and has started faxing more because of it. The confidence level, which was not there even just six months ago, has completely flipped now. They know that whatever they send is going to get there.

Brant Burington
Manager, Technical Services and Support, Sharp Community Medical Group

However, the organization’s existing fax solution was experiencing high fax failure rates and slow fax delivery. According to Burington, “Faxing was one of the worst problems. There were huge delays in delivering clinical information and we were looking at a fax failure rate in the teens. Our solution to address the delivery gap was brute force manual labor. My group spent eight to 12 hours per week resubmitting faxes and making calls to practices with excessive failure rates.”

In searching for a solution, the team at SCMG considered several options but, ultimately, decided on OpenText™ RightFax™, a centralized fax server platform that provides best-in-class EMR integrations with secure and reliable faxing capabilities. Combined with OpenText™ RightFax™ Connect, SCMG was able to move fax transmissions to the cloud, simplifying implementation with a complete end-to-end hybrid fax solution.

“We made the decision to purchase, implement and actually had the solution up and running within a couple of weeks, which is amazing. It worked beautifully, and the way it works for the people who support it and the people who use it is extremely elegant and simple,” reported Burington.

Burington added that the assistance of OpenText™ Professional Services with the solution’s deployment made for a remarkably smooth and rapid implementation. “I’ve been working for our health system for 28 years, and I’ve been through a few hundred software implementations. I can honestly say this was the fastest and easiest of them all.”

The clinicians, physicians and employees who use these systems need to focus on providing quality care to their patients. The less complicated we make it, the more they can focus on their ability to provide high-quality patient care. We are finding OpenText RightFax to be simple, easy, fast and it works.

Brant Burington
Manager, Technical Services and Support, Sharp Community Medical Group

With the RightFax solution in place, SCMG quickly saw its fax failure rates plunge. Burington observed, “We are now looking at a near zero failure rate. This was a huge win. It may be the norm for the OpenText RightFax product to see success rates that high, but when you look at traditional fax systems you don’t usually get anywhere close to that.”

The speed and efficiency of the new system has eliminated SCMG’s faxing delays, which had been impacting the delivery of critical patient information. “Now, we don’t even see a couple of minutes delay in delivery, so the delivery speed has improved drastically with RightFax,” said Burington.

In addition, the team saves hours per week because they no longer spend time manually fixing fax issues. The reliability and high performance of the new system resulted in a significant drop in support calls.

Burington explained, “In system administration, basically all you get are complaints. Faxing issues used to be a problem that was called into our support desk about five to seven times per day. Faxing issues are now something that get called into our support desk about five to seven times per quarter. Truly, the compliments are in the silence.”

“RightFax has been a huge win for us. We have gone from faxing being a real pain point in our system to actually becoming a strength. Our user community knows this and has started faxing more because of it. The confidence level, which was not there even just six months ago, has completely flipped now. They know that whatever they send is going to get there,” said Burington.

“The clinicians, physicians and employees who use these systems need to focus on providing quality care to their patients. The less complicated we make it, the more they can focus on their ability to provide high-quality patient care. RightFax is simple, easy, fast and it works.” The RightFax solution not only gained the approval of users, but also of executive leadership. “Our senior leaders were all very happy about the OpenText RightFax solution. It has eliminated so many complaints and allowed us to work on other projects now, which is exactly the kind of position we want to be in.”

About Sharp Community Medical Group

Sharp Community Medical Group (SCMG) is the largest group of physicians in private practice in San Diego. With a network of more than 800 primary and specialty care physicians working in 350 locations in San Diego County, the company offers families convenient access to healthcare and the ability to get most of it in their own community. Its physicians represent more than 30 specialty areas and admit to 10 local hospitals, including all Sharp HealthCare, Palomar Health and Rady Children’s Hospitals