NorthBay Healthcare

Addressing serious faxing issues that hindered customer service

As a California nonprofit organization, NorthBay Healthcare strives to provide sophisticated care to residents of Solano County through two hospitals, as well as several primary and specialty care and administrative offices. With a focus on service and reliance on timely documentation, the medical provider struggled when it experienced serious issues with its faxing process.

Faxes were lost and employees were receiving illegible documents with black lines obscuring important information such as a patient’s name or data. “Anything that the doctor needed seemed to have a black line going across it. The faxes were useless to us,” recalled Dana Knight, Help Desk manager at NorthBay Healthcare.

Every day, NorthBay’s Help Desk fielded calls from users complaining of the same issue. Office clerks called doctors’ offices to request re-faxing of files. “It stopped everything,” Knight said. “Customer service was not good.” After troubleshooting, NorthBay confirmed that the issue was with Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony limitations. The healthcare organization’s VoIP provider used G.711, the standard for digitizing voice packets over IP, to transmit fax packets. Using G.711 for Fax over IP (FoiP) caused jitter, delays and packet loss in the fax transmission, causing failures and slow transmissions. The VoIP provider did not offer T.38 protocol, which is the recommended protocol for FoIP. NorthBay’s new multi-function printers (MFPs) and OpenText™ RightFax™ Server functioned correctly, but information was jumbled in transit.

“The hardest part was that we had promised the organization we were going to provide a great new system with new MFP machines, new fax server, Fax over IP—that life was going to be so much easier,” recalled Knight. “Instead, we turned it into a total nightmare for our users.”

Fax server reliability, cloud-based delivery

To solve the issue, Knight and her team switched to OpenText™ RightFax™ Connect, a hybrid faxing solution that enabled NorthBay to cloud-enable its RightFax server. By outsourcing the telephony component, NorthBay’s faxing transmissions are no longer hindered by a protocol barrier.

RightFax Connect offers the control and security of the industry’s leading RightFax fax server with the simplicity of cloud-based delivery. It joins other enterprise solutions comprising OpenText Cloud, a platform of technology services and applications designed to connect information to business.

Close to 2,400 employees across NorthBay continue to send faxes multiple times per day. Referrals, insurance checks, authorizations and other documents related to patient care are sent and received through RightFax Connect.

Known for smooth integration with in-house applications, systems and processes, RightFax supports NorthBay’s current and future infrastructure. Eventually, all RightFax traffic will be migrated to the hybrid fax solution. Close to 300 employees use a desktop client at their workstations to manage faxes directly within NorthBay’s email client and other applications. Furthermore, most of the medical provider’s MFPs are connected to RightFax for convenient faxing directly to and from the devices. RightFax will keep faxing even after NorthBay gets a new fleet of MFP devices following the current MFP lease expiration. “RightFax is going to integrate with my new MFP vendor too,” Knight noted. “I won’t have to start all over.” NorthBay plans to fax-enable other tools, including employee health and case management applications.

Easy transition, enhanced customer service

RightFax Connect swiftly healed NorthBay’s fax suffering, according to Knight. “RightFax Connect resolved all of our telephony problems. Instantly, our phone calls to the Help Desk dropped.”

By moving fax transmission to an OpenText Cloud application, NorthBay eliminated onsite telephony concerns, as well as the associated VoIP issues, resolving the fax transmission errors and failures. Users now count on all faxes arriving crisp and clear for processing. They no longer contact doctors’ offices for repeated transmission attempts.

Moreover, the transition from onsite to cloud-based transmission proved seamless. “Implementing RightFax Connect was easy,” Knight said. “The staff didn’t have to be retrained. They continued their workflow as normal and saw no difference except for the quality.”

To manage its fax solution, NorthBay works with The Fax Guys, a Minnesota-based solutions provider and top-tier RightFax partner. “We’ve had great service with them,” Knight said. She knows many companies turn to The Fax Guys and RightFax for impressive return on investment with cloud-based document exchange. While NorthBay is seeing cost savings, the healthcare organization was driven by a different focus. “Our trouble with faxing was actually to the point where we didn’t care what it cost,” Knight says. “When it got as bad as it did for as long as it did, we just needed it fixed.”

When RightFax Connect was installed and calls for assistance stopped, Knight followed up with home health directors who work out of the office and rely heavily on faxes—they reported no issues. “Faxes are coming through with much better quality,” Knight said. “Faxing is now faster for us.”

Reliable and efficient document exchange enables NorthBay departments to fulfill their respective business operations. For instance, referring to the Help Desk, Knight said, “We are a service department and we provide solutions to make patient care easier for our nurses and doctors. For us, the value of RightFax Connect comes down to customer service.”