Here, Will Robinson, vice president of marketing and strategy for Biscom, provides insight into challenges and opportunities in PHI transactions. Biscom has been in healthcare for more than 30 years delivering secure document transfer solutions.
This content is sponsored by Biscom
Q: What is the problem?
Will Robinson: At its core, healthcare is a data-driven industry. Having the right data at the right time has a direct impact on the quality and cost of service delivery. And the amount of data that is being transferred between providers, payers, government organizations and other parts of the ecosystem has grown steadily in the past 20 years. Unfortunately, healthcare organizations’ document transfer solutions were not meant to scale to support the growing demand for sharing PHI. To address the increase in demand, many organizations have had to dedicate resources to manual workarounds. These workarounds often take valuable staff time, are slow and error-prone and ultimately impact service quality and cost.
Q: So what’s the solution?
WR: The solution is to streamline information flow by automating many common data sharing tasks, removing manual processes that drive cost and reduce quality and achieving compliance with industry regulations. This can be achieved by using modern fax and secure file transfer solutions.
Q: Why modern fax and secure file transfer?
WR: Because between these two solutions, you cover all your PHI transfer needs. Fax covers all paper and paper-based transfers and SFT covers everything else. The solutions have similar profiles — they are both HIPAA compliant, have cloud and on-premises solutions and were built to support the needs of the healthcare industry.
Fax
Q: Why is fax still relevant in healthcare?
WR: The simple answer is that fax is used throughout the healthcare industry as the primary way PHI is transferred. It is simple, secure, reliable and it is everywhere. This, coupled with the reality that EMRs have been challenged with easily sharing PHI outside their own systems, means that fax technology will continue to be around for a while. The real opportunity is to turn your fax solution into a competitive advantage by greatly reducing the cost of PHI transfer while improving quality, efficiency and reliability.
Q: What are some of the common issues with legacy fax solutions?
WR: The issues we see most often are the inability to scale, security/compliance, solutions that require manual workarounds, inability to integrate into the IT environment and cost. Inability to scale or integrate into the environment drive manual workarounds, which increases cost and lowers quality. For security and compliance issues, many organizations are concerned their legacy solution may not fully meet HIPAA or other requirements and want something that is guaranteed secure end-to-end.
Q: What are some of the newer features that address these
issues?
WR: I would divide the feature-sets into two pieces, the “musthaves”
and the “intelligent fax” features.
While the “intelligent fax” features are what generates the highest return on investment, there are several “must-haves” that cannot be overlooked in selecting an enterprise fax solution in healthcare. The solution must be fully HIPAA compliant. It must be a true enterprise solution, meaning it scales to meet growing demand, it is easy to use and it has flexible application programming interfaces to integrate into even the most custom of IT environments. The solution must work with the major HIM systems like Epic and GE’s Centricity and, of course, it should integrate with the most common enterprise applications like Outlook, Active Directory and SharePoint.
Q: So what are these “intelligent fax” capabilities that are driving real savings?
WR: We are now able to automate much of the document transfer processes for inbound fax, outbound fax and in-between. This saves huge amounts of time and money. We are cutting processing time from hours to seconds, we are sending information to one or many destinations simultaneously, we are routing documents to any number of systems or devices and we are crushing information-transfer service line agreements. We can scan inbound faxes and route them using optical character recognition or barcodes to any number of people or systems. Likewise, we can configure outbound faxing based on business rules or system events. And finally, we have workflow rules to cover the tasks in-between.
Q: What other intelligent fax features should you consider?
WR: Dashboards and reporting are two other key features to fully leverage your fax solution. Fax environments can be mission-critical and complex, so a dashboard with configurable alarms is a must-have for monitoring system stats and getting ahead of problems. For auditing purposes, it is important to have a fax solution that will log detailed information on each transfer. This way a compliance officer or auditor can see the who, what, where and when of the transfer.
Secure File Transfer
Q: What is secure file transfer?
WR: Secure File Transfer or SFT is a solution that was developed to securely move data of any size or type from point A to point B. Healthcare SFT solutions support HIPAA compliance, automation, integration, monitoring and auditing. It was built to be simple to use, scalable and flexible enough to be integrated into complex healthcare environments/processes. Whereas fax covers almost all paper-based PHI transfers, SFT is for all of the other EMR/PHI files that do not have to be converted from/into faxes. Actually, it can be any type of file with no size limit and HIPAA-compliant security.
Q: How are these files being transferred today?
WR: One method by which many organizations share data is by using FTP or file transfer protocol solutions. This solution was developed in the 1970s and is still being used today.
Q: What are the limitations of FTP?
WR: Simply put, organizations cannot depend on FTP as a core file-transfer solution anymore. In almost all cases, users have had to develop custom workarounds to extend its functionality, make it easier to use and to integrate into complex healthcare environments. All of these extensions require custom solutions that are difficult to develop, expensive to maintain and inefficient. Organizations cannot simply stop using fax, but they need to stop using FTP-based solutions.
Q: So what should I look for in a SFT solution?
WR: Look for a solution that has a history of being deployed in the healthcare environment and one that has been optimized for the nuances of the industry. Specifically, it must be HIPAA compliant. It should have a compliance/audit user-role and supporting reporting. It should have a rules-engine that supports automation and have APIs that were designed for the healthcare environment. And finally, it needs to extremely simple and easy to use. In fact, our user experience mirrors email, so user behavior doesn’t change. Enter a destination, a note, an attachment and send. But unlike email, you can maintain complete control of the file and understand who has access, what type of access they have and when access occurs. Furthermore, you can automatically ‘push’ and ‘pull’ files to and from other systems and devices.
Fax and SFT
Q: OK let’s talk about cost savings — are the ROIs good?
WR: The ROIs for both modern fax and SFT are similar. Both base their economics on automating manual processes and removing legacy hardware and software. The majority of the savings often comes from process automation or removing low-value manual-steps in the document flow process. For example, the sort, scan and file process can be reduced from 15 minutes (on a good day) to seconds. And that savings can be huge. I would estimate about one-third of our customers achieve ROI after three months and that number goes up to 50 percent after six months.
Q: What about cloud vs. server based solutions?
WR: Cloud-based file transfer solutions are generating a lot of interest but there are solid business reasons for using a server or hybrid solution. Cloud-transfer has all the advantages of the SaaS model, including small footprint, predictable costs, continuous upgrades, dynamic capacity and disaster recovery. But organizations could also select on-premises solutions because they want complete and direct control of the environment. For fax, there is also a hybrid configuration — use a fax server as your main faxing system but then have a cloud-service available for peak loads and business continuity. The right solution is driven by the environment and the business objectives.
Q: What should I look for in a secure document transfer
vendor?
WR: I would look for a vendor with extensive healthcare experience and a deep understanding of the industry. This helps with everything from product development to integration to support. Look for a vendor with a complete set of document transfer solutions so you can select the right solution for your environment. Look for a vendor that is best-in-class that will continue to invest and focus on the technology.
At Biscom, we have been helping healthcare organizations with secure document transfer solutions for 30 years. We have seen it all and we can help.
