Customer Insights

Norman Regional Extends Communication Director for the Automated Delivery of Cardiology PDF Documents

Norman Regional Health System

Challenges

Results

Forward Advantage strives to listen to its customers to ensure that it continually develops new solutions that meet their unique challenges. From conversations with many hospitals, such as Norman Regional, it became apparent that there is a common struggle to deliver PDF files to Communication Director. This is because some hospital systems don’t offer the printing functionality that Communication Director has traditionally depended upon for report delivery. This includes systems like cardiology, radiology and oncology, which often generate PDFs that need to be manually faxed or printed and scanned for delivery. Not only is this inefficient, but it is costly and wastes valuable hospital resources. To solve this challenge, Forward Advantage has developed File Pick-Up, a new module that extends Communication Director’s automated report delivery to readable PDF files.

File Pick-Up Brings Immediate ROI to Norman Regional Hospital

Norman Regional Hospital has been a Communication Director customer for the past eight years and welcomed the opportunity to be a beta site for the new File Pick-Up module. Hospital staff were acutely aware of the challenges that PDF files presented, particularly within the Cardiology department. “File Pick-Up was perfect for what we needed with our new cardiovascular system, Fuji Synapse,” says Kate Burger, PACS administrator at Norman Regional. “Our Fuji reports have a nice, professional appearance that includes our logo and detailed graphics. However, we were unable to deliver these reports through Communication Director or MEDITECH, because they are in PDF.”

MEDITECH receives the HL7 data from the Fuji reports so that there is a clean copy in the EMR. However, it only receives the discrete data with none of the report’s professional formatting, so sending these reports through MEDITECH wasn’t a good option for the hospital. With File Pick-Up, Norman Regional can bypass MEDITECH by sending these PDF reports directly to the physician’s office through Communication Director. The graphics and other formatting remain intact, and they can use the same delivery decisions and methods that they do with their other Communication Director reports.

An Easy, Straight-Forward Implementation

Implementing File Pick-Up is a quick and straightforward process. Forward Advantage reviews examples of the PDF reports and then sets up shared folders that File Pick-Up monitors and pulls from. The criteria for this process is determined by the customer, and Forward Advantage tests the functionality, image quality, and end-point delivery prior to go-live. “The implementation was super easy,” says Burger. “It’s a good solution and doesn’t take a lot of time. Knowing that you’re pulling from a trusted database, not guessing on fax numbers and other information, is very beneficial.”

“File Pick-Up has worked so well in Norman Regional’s Cardiology department that they’re considering other departments that might also benefit,” says Kevin Frazier, manager of client services at Forward Advantage. “Their workflow has improved by automating the delivery of these high-quality documents, so no manual transmission is necessary. The cardiologists are also really happy with the quality of the reports sent to the referring physicians.”

“It immediately saved us a great deal of money, because we didn’t have to purchase an expensive extra fax server from our PACS vendor. It also saved us the hassle of having to manage and maintain multiple servers.”

Kate Burger
PACS administrator at Norman Regional

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File Pick-Up

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About Norman Regional Health System

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