King’s Daughters Medical Center (KDMC) is the recipient of numerous awards, including Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work and HealthCare’s Most Wired. KDMC strategically invests in healthcare solutions that not only streamline employee workflow but improve patient care coordination. One of these solutions is Forward Advantage’s Communication Director for enterprise-wide faxing and information exchange. KDMC has had great success with Communication Director, but traditional faxing through its telecom vendor was unreliable. To remedy this issue, KDMC added on Forward Advantage’s CloudFax Connector for cloud-based faxing through Communication Director. The results have been quite impressive.
“We went from a 40% failure rate to less than 1% with the cloud-based solution [from Forward Advantage]. From an efficiency and productivity standpoint, those numbers are huge.” - Carl Smith, CIO at KDMC
Tammy Means, Telecommunications Specialists at KDMC, answers questions below about the benefits of cloud-based faxing that extend past the bottom line – such as positive ROI, increased reliability, and more efficient patient care.
King's Daughters insights
with Tammy Means, Telecommunications Specialist
Q: Describe your history with Forward Advantage and Communication Director.
King’s Daughters uses Communication Director for both inbound and outbound faxing, and it’s a great solution for us. My team calls me the “fax police,” because I can easily see if and why a fax didn’t go through correctly. I’ve added a dozen inbound fax numbers in the past couple of months, and Forward Advantage was very helpful in teaching me how to set these up. If I have any questions, I shoot them an email and they respond right away. We recently switched to Communion Director’s Cloud Fax Connector to address a reliability issue on our telecom vendor’s end. Our faxes through Communication Director are now 100% cloud-based and we’ve experienced zero issues.
Q: Describe the issues with traditional faxing that led you to cloud faxing.
Faxes were not delivered or received reliably, so inconsistency was the biggest issue. This had nothing to do with Communication Director, but we had so many complaints that we had to make a change. Most complaints were from people on the inside, but we’d get complaints from the outside too. In fact, someone from one of our surgery clinics mentioned no longer having to call about unreceived faxes, so I explained how we moved to the cloud. This clinic has access to our system, so they’re saving at least 15 minutes per fax by not having to find the report themselves and then print it. I’m sure our other clinics are much happier as well.
Q: How was the implementation process?
Forward Advantage knew we had a lot of issues, so they really jumped on this to get it going. I was amazed by how quick and simple it was to set up cloud faxing and it’s something I can easily manage myself. Any user could pick it up and run with it, it’s that simple.
Q: Can you share some recent fax statistics?
Since implementing the CloudFax Connector, we have seen a drastic decrease in failed faxes. Over the past month, for example, we have had no more than a 1% failure rate. Before the CloudFax Connector, this would have been more like 50% and that’s not exaggerating.
Q: How much time do you estimate cloud fax saves?
I spent at least two or three hours each day looking at the faxes coming in and going out just to make sure they were delivered. I’d then have to resend them if they failed or use a regular fax machine. Cloud faxing [with Communication Director] frees up a huge portion of my day.
Q: Can you describe the importance of reliable faxing in healthcare?
Reliable faxing has a big impact on patient care. Prior to cloud faxing, our ER referrals often wouldn’t make it where they needed to go. This frustrated patients and could delay them getting an appointment. Reliable faxing also impacts the reimbursement process. Case Management receives faxes as large as 70 pages, which is huge to try and receive through a regular fax line. These faxes used to cut off partway through and it was a real nightmare for them. Case Management now receives these faxes quickly with no problems, and they can send faxes to Medicare and Medicaid on the first try. This all leads to much faster reimbursement.
Interested in learning more about CloudFax Connector?
