Hospitals have a lot to contend with these days, including complicated industry regulations, privacy laws, rising data breaches, and rapidly evolving technology. These challenges are only expected to grow, and organizations with a strong IT infrastructure are best equipped to navigate rapid or unforeseen changes, like a pandemic. Natchitoches Regional Medical Center (Natchitoches, LA) tackles industry challenges head-on using reliable IT solutions and vendor support to help maintain organizational goals, including an exceptional level of patient care.
One of these solutions is Forward Advantage’s Communication Director, which Natchitoches has relied on for enterprise-wide faxing for almost 15 years. Communication Director automates the delivery of roughly 700-1000 Laboratory and Radiology reports per day via SmartRoute technology. We were fortunate to have a sit-down with Kelsey Beaudion, IT Project Manager at Natchitoches, to learn more about their specific use case and how the solution and our service help meet organizational goals. Click here to access the full Q&As.
Reliable Faxing is Essential to Healthcare
Faxing serves a vital purpose in healthcare and this need isn’t expected to change. Given faxing’s HIPAA-compliance, easy implementation, and lower total cost of ownership, faxing remains one of healthcare’s most reliable and secure means of exchanging large quantities of clinical information. While the need for faxing hasn’t changed, the requirements have and there are many options including traditional phone lines, FoIP, cloud faxing, and hybrid cloud faxing. There also ways to optimize your faxing solution to ensure it continues operating at peak performance. In fact, we shared some helpful tips in a recent post - Top Tips for Better Faxing Workflows.
Kelsey Beaudion summed it up best during our interview. Reliable faxing is EXTREMELY important in healthcare,” she states. “We rely on accurate faxes to send out results to the providers who entrust their patients and their testing to us—in a good amount of time. If we cannot get their results to them in a timely fashion, trust in our organization will diminish. This would, in turn, have an adverse impact on referrals, reimbursement, and revenue.”
Communication Director
Communication Director integrates with Natchitoches’ MEDITECH EHR for the automated delivery of Radiology and Laboratory results. Through SmartRoute technology, results are immediately sent to the appropriate care team member using their preferred delivery method. This encourages better clinical workflow and elevates patient care with more prompt follow-up and treatment. Communication Director is an extremely reliable solution able to accommodate the high fax volumes unique to the healthcare industry. “Given that our organization is a hospital providing direct patient care, especially during the pandemic, we cannot afford to be without the tools that help our clinical and support teams run efficiently,” shares Beaudion.
The Takeaway
Natchitoches provides a strong example of a medical center that invested in technology and vendor relationships to always ensure streamlined communications and consistent patient care. Healthcare is a rapidly changing industry that can be difficult to predict. Forward Advantage is here to help, whether that means exploring various faxing deployments and transmission methods or optimizing workflows. Take advantage of your partnership with us to ensure you’re on track to tackle whatever is around the corner!
