Hanging new kitchen cabinets, replacing worn carpeting and tiles, and slapping on a new coat of paint can transform a shabby, beat-up house into a quick seller.
But what’s the point of all those upgrades if the foundation is cracked, the plumbing is shot, and the roof leaks?
Too often, home renovations focus on upgrading and enhancing the items that make a big splash, while seemingly ignoring the less sexy but equally – if not more – important support systems and structures.
The same thing happens in physician offices too.
Providers looking to enhance their operations adopt fancy new electronic medical record (EMR) systems and care technology. Yet, they continue to pinch pennies on the second most important office technology to a healthcare provider: the fax machine.
As we move closer to realizing the goal of complete health care data interoperability, it’s time for healthcare providers, hospitals, and health systems to invest in fax technology with an eye on the future and the same vision for interoperability.
Safe, secure, but far from reliable
Fax technologies offer cheap, secure solutions for sharing patient records. In fact, some argue that it is the most secure way to share patient data.
But fax is far from reliable. Traditional faxing has a 5 percent failure rate, while electronic fax is between 5 and 8 percent. Those numbers climb when the page count exceeds 50 pages, and let’s not forget that no matter how you send, the transmission takes a minute per page to deliver.
In addition, too many providers rely on fax confirmations to ensure delivery, but even those are not sufficient.
Fax confirmations simply show that the sending and receiving fax machines communicated. They do not guarantee the fax was sent to the correct number, the transmission was completed, or that the right person saw the fax.
These are major points of failure that can result in patients receiving inappropriate care or in too many cases, no follow-up care at all.
Time to upgrade
Your fax machine affects your practice more than anything, second to your EMR, and it’s time for providers to stop cutting corners and relying on outdated, bulky, analog fax machines for referring patients and sharing records.
There are an abundance of faster, more reliable, and equally secure options for providers to maintain important connections. At Centralis Health, our hMessage platform can transform your practice’s processes for records sharing and referral with virtually no disruption to current operations.
Our FaxJack technology converts your physical fax machines into secure HIPAA-compliant faxing hubs which allow your users to seamlessly transition to cloud faxing, while keeping the familiar and trusted multi-function machine.
You and your staff can leverage the secure web portal to confirm fax reception instead of waiting on a confirmation sheet or worse, walking away and never knowing if the information was transmitted or not.
On the receiving side, the workflow possibilities are limitless. From the secure web portal, you can track referrals, easily respond to requests from your healthcare provider partners, and leverage internal comments for better interdepartmental communications. Coupled with our Patient Match technology, you can quickly connect incoming faxes with patients, reducing the need to search endless queues and files for the records you need.
You can gain peace of mind knowing documents were viewed, when they were viewed, and by whom. You’ll never have to wonder who your top referral partners are again, because the standard reports give you easy access to volume reports across all your fax numbers in a single user friendly web portal.
This insight can help practice administrators address workload concerns and redistribute staff where they are needed.
Not a pie in the sky plan
hMessage and FaxJack may sound like just another cloud fax solution. But what makes us different is we come from healthcare, not technology.
Our teams understand healthcare because we’ve worked in healthcare at all levels. We know that faxing is trusted, but it can be cumbersome. We also know that sending referrals and sharing patient records are critical to delivering effective patient care.
This is why we offer fax alternatives.
And as much as we support the interoperability goals and the potential for secure email, digital download faxes, and in-network secure messaging that NEVER touches the fax carrier network, we know that the fax process isn’t going to be replaced anytime soon.
Want to learn more?
Connect with one of our reps to get a demo and see how hMessage and FaxJack can enhance your healthcare practice.