Cornerstone of Recovery implement Biscom Secure Fax to Reduce Costs and Improve Patient Care

“Biscom helped me meet the goals for my department by improving the security of sending and receiving PHI. Now we are able to better store and manage scanned electronic documents and promote secure faxing with our end-users, especially in faxing patient health information (to comply with federal HIPAA regulations). This gives us the time to focus on helping as many patients as possible on their path to recovery.”
– Michael Wildsmith, HIPAA Privacy and Security Officer

Overview

For almost thirty years Cornerstone of Recovery, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, has served as an alcoholism and drug addiction recovery center providing inpatient and outpatient care. The Cornerstone program is founded on the Bio-Psycho-Social-Spiritual model of treatment and strives to address all the issues and behaviors that bring a patient to treatment.

Like so many healthcare organizations, Cornerstone uses fax as a major method for sending and receiving protected health information (PHI).

“Of course we regularly send and receive medical records via fax,” explained Wildsmith. “We transmit faxes to and from insurers, other providers, and referring hospitals and treatment centers. We also use fax to transmit information to employers and disability providers. It seems to remain a secure and effective way to send confidential PHI.”

The Challenge

As Cornerstone was expanding its campus with two new buildings and reorganizing its administrative offices, they evaluated how they wanted to handle their fax needs moving forward.

“We did not want to put in new analog lines to enable old fax technology,” said Wildsmith. “It would have increased costs and just didn’t make sense. So we turned to BMC – gave them our requirements and asked them to bring us possible solutions.”

“We have been working with Cornerstone going on four years and have provided a variety of Kyocera multi-function printers to support their growing business,” said Jonathan Irwin, of BMC Office Solutions, a Kyocera dealer. “When we heard the requirements for their new fax solution, we immediately knew Biscom’s fax solutions for Kyocera MFPs were the obvious answer to provide a reliable, secure, and HIPAA-compliant solution for sending and receiving PHI.”

“We were looking for a good price, great security, simple implementation, and ease-of-use. Biscom was a great fit for our needs,” said Wildsmith. “The Biscom solution provided much better  integration with our current hardware and the price was better than any other solution.”

The Result

“From a hard cost perspective, the elimination of phone lines alone in the first two months paid nearly two-thirds of the estimated cost of the new e-fax solution,” explained Wildsmith. “We’re also saving staff time (manual faxing has been virtually eliminated) and bringing patients peace of mind.”

“We have a team of case manager assistants who manage paperwork, helping residential patients apply for FMLA leave, medical benefits, and short-term disability benefits. These are all forms that need to be filled out by hand. We can turn these packets around so much faster with the Biscom fax solution.”

Peace of Mind

“For patients, these are important documents providing them a means to pay their bills and take care of their families. With paper faxes, we had to wait for confirmation pages and they could get mixed in with another print job. Now we get an email confirmation of fax receipt. With the quick turnaround and confirmation, it gives us more time to spend on patient care and lets the patient focus on why they are here, rather than being distracted by details that aren’t part of their recovery.”

End-User Adoption

A transition like this can be challenging for staff, especially in healthcare which has been known to be a slow adopter of new technologies.

“Users love the fact they don’t have to do so much manual labor to fax; they like having the documents electronically as opposed to managing paper – printing, scanning, faxing, and shredding,” imparted Wildsmith. “Being able to send faxes from their desk has encouraged our end users, some who struggle with new technology, to ‘think outside of the box’ and open their minds to using technology to save time and money and be more secure.”

The Biscom Difference for BMC

“From a dealer perspective, we were thrilled to have such an obvious solution available to meet Cornerstone’s needs,” said James Head, Vice President of Sales for BMC Office Technology. “It’s a pleasure to work with Biscom because they’re so responsive in helping us support our customers. They are dedicated to not only the customer’s success but our success in supporting them.”