Modernizing digital faxing to remove staff burden and gain efficiency
• Accelerated the process of uploading patient information—from 5 minutes to less than 30 seconds
• Achieved an annual savings of $2.75M in employee time
• Saved more than $300k a year on toner, paper, printer maintenance and contract fees
• Increased employee satisfaction and retention
• Improved care coordination with referring providers
Symphony Care Network is among the most innovative post-acute care, rehabilitation, long-term care, and assisted living providers in the United States. They provide services across Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin that span 30 different locations, all using PointClickCare as their electronic health record system. With over 40 years of experience, Symphony takes pride in knowing they’ve helped thousands of people overcome life’s most difficult moments.
When most of your healthcare business comes from referrals, the need for reliable, efficient, and accurate communication and electronic data sharing is critical. Before partnering with Kno2, Nathan Patrick Taylor, chief information officer at Symphony, saw that his organization’s central intake team was missing e-faxes – and referrals – due to dated technology. The system would go offline for up to four hours at a time, impeding the care team’s ability to make critical decisions and help navigate patients to the most appropriate care setting within Symphony.
He also saw that Symphony was still using physical paper faxing. Care teams could not send or release faxes from desktops via a secure digital faxing mechanism. As a result, when an e-fax was received, staff had to follow a particularly cumbersome process:
The entire process was time-consuming, not very secure, and error prone.
Beyond referrals, Symphony was also uploading diagnosis sheets and medication lists from faxes into the EHR, which created concerns around patient safety and clinical quality. They were also incurring significant hard costs associated with toner, printer maintenance and repair, paper, and fax contracts.
With Kno2, Symphony was excited to modernize its technology and move away from well-known legacy vendors. Now, the thousands of documents Symphony receives every day via fax are automatically converted into an electronic PDF. And with Kno2’s integration to PointClickCare, the process ensures a seamless patient-matching experience and enhances clinical quality with direct upload into the patient’s chart.
“We wanted our technology to be innovative because we had been stagnant for so long. Kno2’s approach to modernizing digital faxing is something very different that no one else was doing and that’s what we wanted.” Nathan Patrick Taylor, Chief Information Officer, Symphony
Kno2’s proven 99.5% uptime track record sealed the deal for Symphony. It’s challenging to quantify abandoned revenue opportunity due to missed referrals.
“As CIO, my job is largely communication. What we really like about Kno2 is how we receive notifications when there is maintenance or downtime with exactly how long it will last, so no one is in the dark.” Nathan Patrick Taylor, Chief Information Officer, Symphony
In addition to improving business continuity via real-time notifications of downtime, the following key benefits Symphony realized with Kno2 include:
We are now achieving 85% fully modernized electronic faxing and Kno2 was literally the multi-million-dollar ROI answer for Symphony.
Nathan Patrick Taylor
Chief Information Officer, Symphony
Symphony is excited to work with Kno2 on next steps to establish an even more sophisticated process for electronic referral tracking. Another effort underway is pulling “junk faxes” that come through to ensure Symphony only receives faxes with information that pertains to its patients.
“I categorize vendors differently than partners, and Kno2 definitely falls under the partner category. We work together, and it means a lot to know that our relationship isn’t merely transactional.” Nathan Patrick Taylor, Chief Information Officer, Symphony
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