Boise, Idaho—October 13, 2016—Kno2™, the company that optimizes patient document exchange for everyone in healthcare, continues to transform cloud fax for the healthcare industry with the launch of the Kno2 Cloud Fax solution, which leverages the telephony technology of the largest cloud fax vendor, OpenText™. This latest addition to Kno2’s interoperable patient document exchange solution offers healthcare providers, EMR/EHR vendors and other healthcare IT vendors yet another exchange method that ensures delivery of critical patient information to the right provider at the right time, streamlining patient care while optimizing clinical workflows.
Traditional Fax is Falling Behind
Today’s healthcare providers are burdened by manual and electronic fax offerings that disrupt their workflow, introduce security risks and invite human error. Providers using manual fax machines face busy signals, failed faxes, empty toner cartridges, long distance charges, broken hardware and other delays that impact patient care delivery and office staff efficiency. Medical staff are forced to print, scan and then manually attach each faxed document to the appropriate EMR/EHR patient record.
Providers using electronic fax that is not purposely designed and integrated for healthcare face equally onerous workflow breakpoints. Staff receive faxes that contain a variety of documents for one or more patients in a single transmission—some of which are needed, but many are not. Medical office staff must separate the desired documents and attach them to the correct patient record in the EMR/EHR. In many cases, this is performed one by one, resulting in a significant drain on the healthcare workforce and reducing time available for quality patient care.
Evolution of Fax
The new cloud fax solution from Kno2 will eliminate these workflow disruptions, save precious time for healthcare professionals, and introduce a greater level of interoperability that sets the standard for electronic patient document exchange.
“We’ve created a fax solution that is intelligently tailored to healthcare’s existing and future needs,” said Jon Elwell, CEO of Kno2. “By mirroring healthcare workflows with seamless integration into an EMR/EHR, we have introduced a new evolution of fax that enables healthcare organizations to move closer to Direct messaging and query-based exchange, toward a fully interoperable patient document exchange platform, ultimately improving patient care.”
Here is a real world example of how the Kno2 cloud fax solution will eliminate routine fax workflow inefficiencies and bring an organization to a new level of interoperability:
A busy primary care office uses an EMR/EHR, but has no interface to its various referring physicians. The referring physician sends all the patient documents as a single fax, which could include up to 50 pages. Referrals are routed to the appropriate individuals, who then have to separate the documents by patient; shred the pages they don’t need; and sort, index and attach the documentation to the correct patient records within the EMR/EHR.
With the Kno2 solution, medical office staff have the option of converting a portion of the documents to a Direct message and sending it to the provider’s Direct address in the EMR/EHR while the remaining miscellaneous records are stored directly in the patient chart. “Healthcare has unique challenges with patient document exchange—especially with the multiple document exchange platforms,” added Elwell. “Our advanced technology and propriety national healthcare provider directories enable healthcare organizations to search for a provider by location, name or organization, as well as determine their current levels of patient data transmission, such as Direct or an address within the Kno2 system.”
“Our scalable model of data exchange meets the needs of those organizations who aren’t quite ready to leap into Direct messaging or other forms of advanced document exchange. For those organizations that are ready, this cloud fax solution gives them the foundation to benefit from Kno2’s interoperable patient document exchange platform while still managing their remaining fax traffic,” states Elwell. Analytic dashboards allow users to identify high-volume fax partners. Then, using the social connectivity platform in Kno2, users can invite their partners to sign up for Kno2 and take advantage of secure, interoperable, HIPAA-compliant digital document transmission. “With improved interoperable exchange with their most common referral partners, organizations simply won’t want to fax anymore…they will have a newfound desire to use fax to get rid of fax,” summarized Elwell.
