Becker's Hospital Review

42 Executive Briefing Sponsored by: I.T. Brought to you by Taking Control of Secure Personal Health Information Transfer I n today's increasingly complex healthcare ecosystem, the secure and efficient transfer of personal health information is critical to providing both positive patient outcomes and economics. Many organizations can greatly reduce the cost of secure document transfer while also improving compliance and ease-of-use by deploying the latest enterprise fax and se- cure file transfer solutions. 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. 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 or- ganizations and other parts of the ecosystem has grown steadi- ly 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 ser- vice quality and cost. Q: So what's the solution? WR: The solution is to streamline information flow by automat- ing many common data sharing tasks, removing manual pro- cesses that drive cost and reduce quality and achieving compli- ance 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 trans- fers and SFT covers everything else. The solutions have simi- lar 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 health- care industry as the primary way PHI is transferred. It is simple, secure, reliable and it is everywhere. This, coupled with the real- ity that EMRs have been challenged with easily sharing PHI out- side 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, se- curity/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 work- arounds, 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 "must- haves" and the "intelligent fax" features. While the "intelligent fax" features are what generates the high- est 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 trans- fer 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 infor- mation to one or many destinations simultaneously, we are rout- ing documents to any number of systems or devices and we 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.

• Cover