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Six Healthcare Workflows Primed for Cloud Faxing
Cloud faxing is more than capable of meeting the healthcare industry's demand for secure, efficient, and useful information sharing.
Traditional faxing introduces far too many risks to remain a staple of healthcare communications. But that doesn't spell the end for the fax as cloud faxing proves perfectly capable of addressing several inefficiencies in information sharing.
Faxing is entrenched in healthcare as a result of its ease of use and end-user familiarity with the technology. According to estimates, 75 percent of all medical communication occurred via the fax as of 2018. And findings from a recent American Medical Association survey indicated that a majority of physicians use the phone and fax as the primary method for completing prior authorizations.
And while federal officials continue to call for the end of faxing in healthcare, paper still provides a means to reduce the number of manual processes necessary for data sharing. According to the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, providers could save a minimum of 1.1 million labor hours every week by using electronic transactions instead of manual processes. The council estimates that each sent paper fax, phone call, or piece of correspondence requires an average of eight minutes to complete but can take as much as 30 minutes. All that wasted time costs the healthcare industry more than $9 billion annually.
With cloud faxing, the industry can eliminate the need for traditional fax machines and participate in more robust and timely data exchange. Digital cloud fax technology moves beyond the conventional fax and remains a viable — and dominant — method to securely send documents among providers, payers, and ancillary services providers by eliminating the need to maintain fax infrastructure, integrating with existing EHR technology, and securing share information using end-to-end encryption.
According to Bevey Miner, HIT Strategy and Global Chief Marketing Officer, six present-day workflows would receive a considerable boost from the use of cloud faxing:
With faxing technology serving as the lowest common denominator for ubiquitous communication across all healthcare entities, here’s a closer look at how a cloud faxing solution can improve each of these workflows.
Pharmacy refills
A lack of interoperability between clinical and pharmacy systems has contributed to delays in refilling prescriptions.
“One of their largest workflows that are enabled by fax are pharmacy refills,” said Miner. “It's very cumbersome; it's not well-communicated. So what happens is they send a lot of faxes back and forth, which isn't efficient for them.”
Signatures represent a particular sticking point. They are necessary for maintaining compliance with federal and state laws. The lack of an agreement around physical or digital signatures hinders what should be a straightforward process.
“Because of strict regulation on certain narcotics, you have to have physician signature, but not every system recognizes a digital signature," Miner explained. "With more mature cloud faxing technology, there's an opportunity for improvement for the area of communication as well as integration.”
Labs
Whether to fulfill a doctor's request to seek a specific diagnosis or to manage a long-term condition with routine blood draws, a physician's signature provides the green light for the test or procedure — and reimbursement.
"No ancillary organization is going to do anything without a physician's signature because you can't bill Medicare or insurance without that," says Miner.
The problem is that labs tend to function independently, even when housed within a provider's own organization. Ancillary service providers use their own lab systems that don't integrate with provider EHR technology.
"Sometimes, when you go to a health system, they have a lab in-house — many times they don't. If you go to urgent care, they don't have a lab in-house. Ambulatory centers don't have labs, so they're going to have to go to an outsourced lab. They send you with a piece of paper (or a piece of paper is waiting for you at the lab) that you need to get your labs drawn,” Miner reveals.
These ad-hoc, paper-based systems enable patients to access these necessary services but at the expense of the provider having insight into when and if they take place.
Referrals
In many ways, Referrals are the lifeblood of healthcare. Referral from a primary care physician to a specialist. Referral to home care or a physical, speech, or occupational therapist after an inpatient hospital stay. Referral to hospice. Referrals make patient care happen.
Signed orders are a must, and ambulatory data systems do not interoperate with specialist practice management or EHR systems. From a business relationship standpoint, the number of incoming/outgoing faxes serves as a metric for business development staff to gauge the success of marketing efforts. Converting this paper workflow to cloud fax is easy, and it provides greater accountability that referrals are being accepted in a timely fashion so care can begin.
“There's no better way that is available today than using a fax or cloud fax technology for that workflow,” Miner stresses. “The lack of interoperability between primary care and ancillary service providers means that cloud fax remains a very good choice to get referral information out and assessment information back.”
Radiology/Image reports
Image archiving and communication systems allow radiologists to manage their own data, but their lack of interoperability with EHR system contributes to inefficiencies in information exchange. Diagnostic reports and images are still faxed to the referring physician as a result.
"When you go to the doctor, they'll send you someplace to get an MRI or an x-ray. Most outpatient clinics don't have that capability so that faxing back and forth is the way they share that information," notes Miner.
Although faxed images wouldn't be used for diagnosis, images and reports do need to be added to the patient record, including a timestamp when the images were taken. Although physical faxing remains common for this application, cloud faxing can make the process faster and easier. “Although physical faxing remains common for this application, cloud faxing can make the process more robust by adding audit trail and logging to each fax transmission.”
Prior authorizations
Payers are working to improve outcomes and reduce costs by requiring prior authorizations from providers. As reported by the AMA survey above, faxing is the preferred method for meeting these requirements.
The sheer volume of patient information, labs, images, and other documentation that pass daily between providers and payers for prior authorization can be overwhelming. According to the Medical Group Management Association, 82 percent of providers find prior authorization overwhelmingly burdensome.
Cloud faxing can provide relief by keeping records in a readable electronic form. “All of that narrative documentation, the volumes of written, handwritten narrative documentation and structured documentation is ideally suited for cloud fax,” says Miner.
Release of information
The challenges revolving around prior authorizations also apply to release of information. Even if medical records and labs could be sent electronically, chances are that unstructured data such as physician notes wouldn’t be included.
Unstructured data such as physician notes aren't going away, emphasizing the need to store this data into electronic format and included in the patient’s medical history.
“Being able to access this information electronically is vital, but it is also important that recipients can print out, mark up and highlight, or refer back to this information such as in the case of a lawyer or a workers' compensation investigation,” Miner warns. “That's truly how people still work when they're sorting through these large volumes of documents. I see that always being a part of those departments, those large-volume faxing narrative documents.”
The days of the traditional, physical fax machines are numbered in physician offices, nursing stations, pharmacies, and labs.
But the technology laid the groundwork for cloud faxing, which is very much alive and capable of meeting the healthcare industry's demand for secure, efficient, and useful information sharing.
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Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: CCSI) is a global leader of digital technology for secure information transport. The company leverages its technology heritage to provide secure solutions that transform simple digital documents into actionable information, including advanced healthcare standards HL7 and FHIR for secure data exchange. Consensus offers eFax Corporate, a leading global cloud faxing solution; Consensus Signal for automatic real-time healthcare communications; Consensus Clarity, a Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence solution; Consensus Unite and Consensus Harmony interoperability solutions; and jSign for secure digital signatures built on blockchain. For more information about Consensus, visit consensus.com and follow @ConsensusCS on Twitter."
