Carilion Health System needed to be able to electronically transmit prescriptions directly from within their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) application to pharmacies without creating additional work for their physicians or the IT staff that supported them. By implementing Biscom’s FAXCOM CV Plus, they were able to realize time and money savings for both groups.

Carilion Health System
Based in Roanoke, Virginia, Carilion Health System is a large hospital system with over 10,000 employees. Carilion owns seven hospitals and over one hundred medical practices, including multi-specialty, family practices and residency programs, throughout southwestern Virginia.

Desktop faxing is an important part of Carilion’s administrative functions, but electronically transmitting prescriptions drives their essential need for a fax server solution. The most efficient way to get prescriptions to the pharmacy is to electronically transmit them. Each prescription must also be tracked and entered into the patient’s medical record. This requires a solution that can be integrated directly with the EMR system already being used by prescribing physicians – in this case, GE’s Centricity EMR application. Carilion Health System sends over seventy thousand faxes every month, making this an essential business function.

The Problem
Carilion’s old fax system did not integrate well with GE Centricity EMR. Electronically transmitting prescriptions was a multi-step process that required eight or more mouse clicks to accomplish. In some cases the process required the user to open a separate application instead of transmitting from within Centricity. This was particularly vexing for physicians trying to maximize their time with patients. User management was also a serious problem. Carilion was unable to maintain a single centralized phone list. “We had to have a different phone list for each separate facility,” recalls Mike Dent, Carilion’s EMR Manager. “It was a maintenance nightmare!”

Error checking was also a difficult task with the previous fax system. Keeping track of error messages and fax status messages and ensuring that they were properly recorded in Centricity was often a full-time job for the IT staff. Users sometimes deleted faxes and then needed them retrieved from the fax server logs, a cumbersome and time-consuming manual process. Fax server management was a challenge, as each location required its own management application.

Biscom’s FAXCOM CV Plus Solution
Carilion Health System found a solution that met their requirements in Biscom’s FAXCOM CV Plus Fax Server solution. FAXCOM CV Plus is a full featured, customer-installable, enterprise-level fax solution that integrates with GE Centricity EMR. Users can electronically transmit prescriptions, letters, and documents directly from within the Centricity interface, select fax recipients from the Centricity contact list, and view the status of their transmitted faxes. Fax administrators can easily view and resolve any fax transmission errors.

Faxing From Centricity EMR
FAXCOM CV Plus has given Carilion Health System tighter integration with Centricity and much greater control over their fax system. Users can electronically transmit prescriptions, lab reports and other documents directly from within Centricity and with fewer steps than before. The old system required physicians to go outside the Centricity application and make at least eight mouse clicks to send a prescription. FAXCOM sends directly from the Centricity interface with one to three clicks. “Physicians are click counters and they equate this to timesavings per patient,” says Mr. Dent. “They love it - the time savings for them has just been wonderful.”

As for the IT staff, the centralized management of the FAXCOM solution has allowed them to consolidate the phone books from every location into a single, integrated user list accessible by every Centricity user. “Time savings from the IT side is multiple, multiple hours,” says Mr. Dent. “This was a no-brainer for us based on improved phone book management alone.” FAXCOM’s centralized management also allows the IT group to manage individual fax servers remotely from one location – a big advantage when dealing with over twenty-four hundred users in over one hundred locations.

User requests have dropped sharply now that users can immediately determine the status of their own sent faxes. Requests to retrieve accidentally deleted faxes are also more easily dealt with by the IT staff. With Biscom’s Job Tracking and Reporting module, IT staff can run reports to easily locate the fax message in question. “This has really streamlined our workflow,” remarked Mr. Dent. “We’re now starting to take advantage of this functionality to track the number of transmissions sent by each practice in order to find other ways to streamline the overall process.”

Carilion has rolled fax functionality out to other applications beyond GE’s Centricity EMR. FAXCOM CV Plus is integrated at Carilion with Novell GroupWise, Siemens’ Novius, and McKesson’s Homecare application, among others. FAXCOM also provides fax capabilities to a large number of Multi-Function Peripheral (MFP) devices at various Carilion locations.

Biscom’s Heartbeat module monitors the performance of all of the fax servers and alerts IT staff if anything goes wrong. “The system works so well I can’t remember the last time we had a problem with it,” says Mr. Dent. “We’re adding twelve new practices over the next few months and any applications they have that require faxing will get hooked right up to FAXCOM.”

Benefits
Carilion Health System has realized significant timesavings for the physicians and the IT staff. Implementing the FAXCOM CV Plus solution did not represent a large capital outlay, and a return on the investment was accomplished in a matter of months. Implementation was effortless, according to Mike Dent: “We sent servers to Biscom, they installed the software, and once they came back, we were sending within thirty minutes. It would be nice if everything could be that simple! Biscom’s support staff has shown a high level of expertise and overall support has been great when we have had to use it.”

Carilion selected FAXCOM with an eye towards future expansion. The current configuration consists of two fax servers supporting twenty-three ports each for a total of forty-six available fax ports. Each server can be upgraded to support ninety-six fax ports, for a total capacity of one hundred ninety-two fax ports – all without adding new servers.

Conclusion
Carilion Health System implemented FAXCOM CV Plus to streamline their processes and provide their physicians with a more integrated faxing tool. The results have exceeded their expectations at every level, letting them concentrate on providing Carilion Health System services. The system has proved to be popular with users, and the IT group is delighted to not have to worry about maintaining the system. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” advised Mr. Dent. “It’s so nice to not have to worry about anything!”