Cape Cod Healthcare Improves Customer Service with Biscom Fax Solution

Overview

Cape Cod Healthcare (CCHC) is the leading healthcare services provider for Cape Cod, Massachusetts residents and visitors. With more than 5000 employees, CCHC offers an array of critical patient services including two acute care hospitals, homecare and hospice service, nursing and rehabilitation, assisted living, and more than 17 laboratory service locations.

As the choice healthcare services provider for thousands of residents and guests, CCHC relies heavily on fax across its entire enterprise in order to deliver the best patient care possible. On average, CCHC sends and receives over 2200 faxes per week between its 17 laboratory locations and Falmouth Hospital. CCHC decided that their current fax solution was ineffective leading to too many misfiled faxes and delays in patient care so the company began its search for a secure, electronic fax system that would mitigate these issues.

Disorganization Leads to Delayed Patient Care

CCHC receives several hundred faxes every day to schedule patient appointments and receive physician’s orders. But the company’s traditional paper fax service was antiquated, disorganized and time consuming for employees, causing internal frustration and delaying patient care.

Physician’s orders were often lost, misfiled or sent to the incorrect location, resulting in miscommunication and confusion between CCHC schedulers and patients.

CCHC schedulers would search for misplaced paper faxes and orders at least 20 times per day, delaying appointments and patient care. In addition CCHC Staff had to manually scan patient records and orders in order to securely file documents electronically. This system was not only tedious and time consuming, but caused patient care issues when documents were misfiled or had not been scanned correctly.

“Using the paper fax machine caused an incredible amount of wasted time for our employees and our patients,” said Laura Vollmer, Manager Rev Cycle, FCC and Scheduling at CCHC. “Team members had to constantly go back and forth to retrieve orders and search through hundreds of faxes, with orders often getting lost in the chaos. We depend on orders to be on schedule, and the delays were hurting us.”

Updating the System

With hundreds of daily faxes, keeping track of each one was challenging and time-consiuming. To keep patient records secure and organized, CCHC needed a fax solution that was:

Centralized and electronic, allowing for auto-filing of documents across 19 CCHC locations and laboratories
Scalable, sustaining the volume of orders received daily
Efficient, reducing wasted employee time and enabling easier tracking and tracing of faxes
Secure, to support HIPAA requirements

After considering their options, CCHC turned to Biscom to address their fax needs.

Improving Patient Care with Biscom’s FAXCOM

The CCHC team was impressed with the ease-of-use and simplicity of Biscom’s fax service. The new solution made the transition to electronic fax seamless, helping CCHC improve multiple processes, including receiving, scheduling, and filing physician’s orders. These improvements made filing simpler, reduced errors, and ultimately helped CCHC better serve its patients.

“Looking back, I don’t know how our team survived using a traditional paper fax system,” Vollmer explains. “Now, with Biscom, instead of having a patient wait while our team manually searches through hundreds of pieces of paper, all data, records, and orders are right at our fingertips.”

FAXCOM provided CCHC with a full-featured enterprise electronic fax solution that offers data protection and workflow that supports their business processes. With FAXCOM, CCHC eliminated hours of work and has saved at least 10% of the time previously required to manually scan, file, and send patient records and physician’s orders, significantly reducing patient wait times.

Equipped to handle the high volume of daily faxes received, CCHC schedulers can now easily search for needed records and orders through the new electronic fax solution, allowing for a more streamlined, efficient system. Today, CCHC can process patients in under 15 minutes.

“Biscom’s FAXCOM solution has been key to improving efficiency across our entire business,” said Vollmer. “FAXCOM has allowed us to more quickly serve our patients and ultimately improve the overall customer experience and satisfaction. With everything being stored centrally, we no longer have to worry about misplaced faxes. Implementing Biscom has been the best decision — I can’t imagine going back to a paper fax service.”

Since the initial implementation, CCHC has expanded the FAXCOM solution into all of its laboratory locations, Falmouth Hospital, and the CCHC Oncology department. With FAXCOM, patient satisfaction rates and HCAHPS scores have significantly increased, helping drive more patients to CCHC.