OCHIN

Like most health care providers, OCHIN’s members use fax as part of their regular patient information exchange process, especially for services that haven’t yet caught up with common EHR data-sharing technology or are on an external system.

Fax system inefficiencies, health information security concerns and rising costs resulted in organizational challenges and didn’t reflect the best standards in patient care. To address these challenges, OCHIN sought a secure, centralized fax solution that would integrate with its existing EHR.

Enter OpenText™ RightFax™, a centralized fax server solution for powerful, secure and compliant faxing capabilities across an entire health organization. Adding OpenText™ RightFax™ Connect, a cloud fax transmission service, to an on-premises RightFax server simplifies deployments by eliminating the complexity of maintaining and troubleshooting RightFax connections to an on-premises telephone system.

Paul Matthews, chief technology officer at OCHIN, described the search for a solution, “While there are a plethora of faxing vendors on the market, we chose OpenText RightFax because it is best-in-class for integrations, scalability and value. OpenText provided a level of integration into our Epic and NextGen EHR systems that we simply couldn’t get with other fax vendor offerings.”

Since deploying the RightFax solution, OCHIN and its member clinics have seen improved operational performance, enhanced productivity and security, reduced costs and increased integration. By automating the exchange of fax information directly into the EHR, RightFax accelerated the flow of information to health care providers on OCHIN’s system.

“The OpenText RightFax Connect capability to expand capacity for sending and receiving faxes is extremely beneficial. We had a lot of clinics, especially rural ones, who were often limited by their ability to add enough telephone capacity in their on-premises infrastructure. The OpenText cloud solution has removed that limitation and faxes are now sending much faster than they were in the past. They aren’t delayed, waiting for a telephone line to be available,” explained Matthews.

Additionally, the integration between RightFax and OCHIN’s EHR platforms delivers a seamless experience critical to operations. Layering RightFax onto the implementation, OCHIN’s user experience remained the same. The ability to easily layer without changing how providers, front desk and medical records staff used the system was an important part of OCHIN’s success with the solution.

As the security officer for the company, Matthews appreciates how the integration greatly increased audit trails and assurance of patient privacy. Matthews noted, “Knowing that I can audit everything helps on the compliance side to meet all of our HIPAA obligations. OpenText RightFax has been very helpful for that.”

Finally, the automated faxing solution delivered savings to OCHIN’s members who struggled with staff time and costs of manually faxing, printing and scanning documents and maintaining multiple fax systems. The savings allow clinics to direct more resources to patient care, rather than administrative tasks associated with faxing. Matthews added, “One of the biggest benefits of the OpenText RightFax solution is the reduction of cost related to resources and labor hours, as well as materials, such as paper and ink.”

“Our ongoing work is focused on creating the most efficient and cost-effective solutions possible for our member clinics. They are treating the most vulnerable among us and the success of these small clinics depends on innovation and doing more with less,” said Shane Hickey, senior director, Partnerships and Innovation at OCHIN.

OCHIN’s success with RightFax is an important step toward meeting that aim.