An award-winning cancer treatment center, representing a collaboration between the nation’s top doctors, researchers, and specialists, offers more options for cancer care than any other organization in the world.

With such a robust team across three locations, this medical organization relies heavily on fax communication in order to deliver critical documents, including patient medical records and lab results. Unfortunately, their old fax solution was highly manual and error-prone where lost faxes frustrated clinicians and impacted patient care. Furthermore, there was a growing concern that unsecured paper faxes could violate patient privacy requirements required by HIPAA.

The Challenge

This hospital sends and receives an average of 10,000 faxes every month, with some faxes exceeding 800 pages. The 180 analog lines was running at a 20% error rate, and staff often found faxes containing confidential patient information that were misfiled or simply lost.  The process of managing faxes was extremely manual – paper faxes were sent to fax machines, and those faxes were manually scanned into electronic form and filed. Managing faxes took over 16 staff hours per day.

The analog fax lines was also costing the hospital over $5,000 per month, not to mention the cost of maintenance, toner cartridges, and paper – which they were buying at a rate of 45 cases per week.

With faxes monopolizing time and resources, the medical team’s attention was often taken away from providing the acclaimed care their patients needed. If that wasn’t enough, their existing fax solution put their HIPAA compliance at risk. As the issues compounded, it became clear that their old fax solution was not meeting their needs.

The Solution

“There were three factors that came into play when making our final decision to bring on a new fax provider,” explained the hospital’s Telephony Engineer. “First, we needed a platform with consistently high send/receive success rates. Second, it should be intuitive and easy for the end-user. And third, it must seamlessly support our IT teams. After we tested all the solutions, we realized Biscom was all of those things and more.”

The Biscom enterprise fax solution not only provided the performance, ease-of-use, and data protection required, but also implemented Biscom’s Advanced Fax Routing module that automated their business processes. Since the initial implementation, Biscom has reduced the time it takes to manually scan, file, and send medical records by over 60% resulting in saving a staggering 65 person-weeks a year!

“With FAXCOM’s automation, we have saved an enormous amount of time and money by not having to manually scan and file paper faxes and our paper consumption has dropped by 66%,” says the hospital.

Results

Deploying FAXCOM resolved the hospital’s plaguing fax issues and also presented a compelling ROI that paid for the solution well within the year.  With the change, they are saving a minimum of $200,000 per year—$100,000 in staff savings due to automation, $40,000 in paper savings, and $60,000 in analog line costs. Also, by moving away from paper faxes, they significantly reduced the potential for misplaced or lost patient documents – further minimizing the risk of HIPAA violations.  In fact, the solution has been so well received that other groups have moved to the FAXCOM solution including clinical, HIM, purchasing, IT, and physicians.

Biscom’s fax automation solution has provided this hospital with a secure fax solution that enables digital automation and filing, provides a scalable solution for the volume of faxes transmitted, and greatly reduces cost and time – thus presenting more opportunities to do what they do best: providing the best cancer treatment to their patients.